


Bubbles and Fairy Wings

by karakael



Category: Strange Magic (2015), Thunder and Lighting series
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Gen, Little People in Jars AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-19
Updated: 2018-01-18
Packaged: 2018-08-09 16:55:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 43,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7809871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karakael/pseuds/karakael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Its hard being the heir of an entire planet. Its even harder when said planet thinks it's completely fine to keep 10 billion people in stasis forever, and you don't agree with it. But with a creepy ex, a clueless younger sister and a best friend with an impossible Potion, its kind of hard to concentrate on saving the world.</p>
<p>Especially when a coachroach full of goblins shows up to start a revolution</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Marianne

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is written for the "Tiny People in Jars" and "Sci-Fi" prompts.
> 
> Its also based loosely on the Thunder and Lightning series by John Varely. All you have to know about that is that there are space-time bubbles that do weird things, and Earth was nearly destroyed by giant jelly-bean crystals and the entire population of the planet was forced into stasis.
> 
> And if that wasn't weird enough, wait for _this_ AU. There are space-fairies.

"C'mon, Marianne. You're better than this."

Princess Marianne, Fairy of the highest rank, Hereditary Leader of the Armies of Mars and Future Queen of All Enlightened Space paused in her patrol, expression chilling as surely as water on Ganymede. She turned to the holographic image that floated beside her.

"Better than what, exactly? Is there a more worthy task than ensuring the safety of ten billion souls?" 

Roland grimaced and looked down the corridor he had found his former fiance guarding. Row upon row of jars surrounded them, stretching far into the distance, until the haze of the cool chamber obscured them from sight. 

These were not even the special bottles, lovingly crafted and made unique by family or servants to hold a loved one until their skills were once again needed. No, the jars that now surrounded them were simple, ugly things, most without even a label to differentiate one from another. Just endless rows of identical jars, each holding a single black bubble inside. 

"Souls? They're Earthlings. They aren't sophisticated enough for souls."

Marianne bit her tongue to prevent herself from exploding on Roland. It would do little good, and he was only expressing what most other Fairies believed. Earth-based Life Forms, or E.L.Fs, were pitiful in comparison to the humans that had risen from Earth's ashes. Even she could admit that sometimes.

Not that Roland noticed her silence, prattling on with that condescending tone he was so good at that was almost - almost - as irritating as his physical presence. "Anyways, if you're going to patrol a useless building, why don't you at least focus on the areas with people. Might as well get a laugh out of doing your duty, right?"

"Had you considered, Roland, that I chose this task to avoid people?" 

It was true enough. The press of all her social responsibilities sometimes weighed on the Crown Princess, a concept that Roland had never understood. Standing in the silent, echoing halls of forgotten humanity was comforting, especially after a particularly embarrassing dinner or harsh council criticism. These halls were a reminder that no matter how much she screwed up this grim mausoleum could never be destroyed.

"C'mon, Buttercup, let people see that pretty face of yours. Remind them that you're still kicking."

She sighed, but Roland had a point, damn him. If she stayed on deep patrol much longer people might start to wonder if she had bubbled herself just to get out of her responsibilities. Certainly she wasn't the first woman in her family to have considered it...

But no, as nice as curling her wings around herself and hanging silent for a few centuries sounded, she wasn't going to run away that easily. It was just what Roland wanted. So instead she stalked to the nearest transfer plate, dismissed Roland's chattering image, and sent herself over to the awakening bays. At least she would have a few minutes of peace before Roland hacked his way back into her system.

\--------- 

The Awakening Chambers could not have been more different from the cool corridors she had left. She materialized in the atrium of the wing and was immediately assaulted with warm light and the sound of tinkling water. She stepped from her plate onto smooth olivine, and took a deep breath of sweet air. Technically she did not need earth-like air to breath, but there was something about it that every Earth-descendant, from the original E.L.Fs to modified humans like Fairies, could not quite replicate from recycled oxygen and nitrogen. 

In fact this air was specifically designed to seem closest to old Earth atmosphere, of course without all the pollutants that the E.L.Fs had lived with their whole lives. Many would find themselves able to truly breath for the first time upon leaving their bubble. 

Everything else about the building was also designed to be comfortable to E.L.Fs as well. Once they left the holding chambers they would be in for the shock of their lives, but the Awakening building was designed to lessen that shock as much as possible. No windows, only panes of light mimicking Earth sunlight rather than the weaker light of Mars. Simple, unmodified plants, carefully chosen to look similar to those even the most impoverished Earthling might recognized. Blue-grass grew around the fountain, with vines on the walls and bamboo in the corners. Flowers from every continent grew in solid planters; pansies to peonies, lotus to lilies, dandelions to dahlias; all lending their soft scents to the room. No music played, but there were timeless plantings on the walls between leaves and vines, mostly Asian landscapes but also African patterns and European pastorals. In a word, welcoming.

Not to a Fairy or Martian, of course. But to an E.L.F it looked somewhere between a utopia and a doctor’s office. At least, that was the intent. 

There were some E.L.Fs wandering the room, but these were clearly either family members of someone Awakening or visitors to the Museum. They all respectfully bowed their heads and moved aside as Marianne appeared, though likely they didn’t recognize her but only the Armed Forces uniform she wore. 

Roland would have encouraged her to question the E.L.Fs, if just to flaunt her authority, but she could easily read their auras and see their purposes. All green, all cleared to be in the facility, and that was enough for Marianne. If she had truly wished for more information she need only focus her second sight on one E.L.F or another and her internals would supply everything she needed with a helpful text ring around the E.L.F in question. No need to embarrass the elderly man or the young mother anxiously waiting for news. Let their children hold onto their illusions just a little longer.

Her patrol could take her either direction; left to the end of the Awakening route, to which all the E.L.F families were looking, or right to the beginning, where the Atrium hugged closest to the catacombs she had just come from.

It was really no choice. She always took the same route, following the path her mother had lead her on time and time again, ensuring that Marianne never forgot her lessons.

So she strode on, only glancing briefly at each guest, before continuing her patrol, her feet taking her away from the public areas and on into the Awakening rooms.

Then she slipped through a wall into a service entrance, door clear to her eyes but hidden from all civilian personnel. No one had accidentally discovered it, that much was obvious from even a cursory glance, but it slipped her out of sight and into a much more controlled environment.

The beginning was always the most dangerous, for both ELFs and the Fairy staff of the Bubble Repository. ELFs came out of their bubbles disoriented and - quite understandably - scared; the horrors of Earth’s fall still fresh in their minds. But the Fairy staff were well trained and there were lesser Forces personnel standing by to assist. Each nodded to her as she walked by, polite but more interested in their jobs. Every staffer had their own room, each outfitted for the Fairy’s specialty but all in calming cream tones that would remind the ELFs of Earth doctor’s visits and safety. 

Marianne only briefly glanced at the staffers, confident in the both the Forces and Awakening technicians. Today there appeared to be only a handful of either in the facility. One staff member sat before a bank of monitors, carefully cued up a bubble, sending commands over their personal connection to the over-net, confirming with elegant hand gestures the specifications they were looking for. Another prepared a medi-bay for an ELF who had been marked down as in need of medical attention post-bubble. A third had activated a containment field as she examined a de-bubbled ELF who seemed shell-shocked and malnourished - very common for Earthlings who had been taken from poorer areas. In other rooms staffers inoculated ELFs against modern diseases and fixed any lingering Earth illnesses or simple genetic conditions. There were only a few Fairy guards, but all were focused on their private views of the rooms they monitored, ready at any moment to assist a staffer whose patient was not coming gracefully from their jar.

But there were no alarms while Marianne inspected the forty-odd rooms of the de-bubbling wing. There had not been an alarm for a good five months, mostly thanks to the over-net and staffers expertise when it came to choosing candidates for de-bubbling. Still, the guards remained vigilant, and Marianne saluted them before continuing on. 

The second portion of her patrol was both easier and more difficult. Easier because these ELFs were already vetted by the doctors and specialists in the Awakening wing. Harder, because she forced herself to listen each time she did this patrol, just as her mother had taught her.

One moment she was in the quiet silence of the medical wing, the next she walked into a wave of sound, information coming from the hundred rooms of this wing, all encoded in the voices coming from the open doors. 

Her wings raised and she put up her own shields, silencing all but sounds of danger and the voices from the nearest room.

“Tell me what you remember.” 

A first session, then. The further away from the medical wing, the further one was along in their Awakening. 

“Earth was attacked by - crystals, I think? Giant, huge things that crashed into the ocean. Bigger than buildings. They destroyed every city on a coast from the waves. I didn’t know, then. Too far inland. But there were too many people, all fleeing the cities, and no one knew what to do. I didn’t think it would touch us, but it did. There were riots, and they took our food away, and then - “ 

The ELF paused, tears streaming down their face. The Fairy staffer patted their arm kindly.

“Go forward a bit. To when you were bubbled.”

The ELF tightened their hold on the jar they had been kept in. For many, it was the only possession they had left. Marianne could see the callouses through the clear glass.

“We didn’t leave home on the first wave to Mars. We didn’t believe the crystals were really coming. But after...I didn’t care if bubbling just meant putting off the end. I couldn’t...I couldn’t let them live like that. If there was even a chance for a better future, I would take it. We volunteered for the second wave, anything that would take us to Mars.”

The staffer nodded.

“That’s where you are now. Mars.”

The ELF looked at her, tears still falling. “I don’t care about any of that. Where - ”

But Marianne turned away, blocking her mind from the question every ELF asked first, and moved on to the next room.

“Mathew, is it? Your documentation says you were a painter.” 

This ELF was going through his job placement.

“Yes. It was only a hobby, but - “

“Things are different now, Mathew. We don’t need accountants or lawyers. Your skills with a brush will be more than enough.”

“How?”

Marianne could hear the smile in the staffers voice. “We collect energy from photosynthesis now. We need painters for the leaves.”

She moved on as the former accountant-turned-painter stuttered in shock and then gasped in wonder as he was shown the delicate lattice he would spend the rest of his days painting. 

“How long has it been? You haven’t answered that yet.”

The next staffer sighed. “You’ve been here long enough. You’ve seen our technology - you’ve seen me. What do you think?”

“A long, long time?”

“Yes. 2,000 Earth Years.”

And the next.

“You have questions.”

“You have wings!” The voice of a child, and the staffer laughed.

“Yes, I have wings. All evolved humans have them. You might be able to make them, too.”

_Unlikely_ Marianne thought. Wings were a manifestation of dozens of different powers, granted in equal part by the way that the bubbles warped consciousness and centuries of genetic manipulation to help the human race survive. 

“And can you do magic?”

Another laugh. “It might seem like it, yes. But it’s not magic, not really. It’s science.”

To see a child de-bubbled was always heartening. Some ELF was waiting for them, and they would finally be a family again, albeit one in a world far, far different with rules that might not make sense. For at least one person, the question “where is my mother” would be answered with no heartbreak.

“So you’re saying you’re 'more evolved'? What the hell does that mean?” 

“Simply put, humanity has changed a lot in the thousands of years since your home fell.”

“I get some of it - you’re taller ‘cus Martin gravity is lighter. You engineered your self better lungs and organs to last longer and not be in so much danger in space. We were starting to do that when everything when crazy. But the wings?”

“You’re file says you were a physicist. Do you understand the science behind bubbles?”

“Sorry to say that was way beyond me. They’re some kind of singularity, right? White ones can make endless power by warping space, black ones can store things in a bubble of space-time.”

“We’ve stopped using the white bubbles, but yes. What early humans didn’t understand - what Earth didn’t understand - was that one can make a bubble with only your mind.”

“What? That’s - “

“Crazy?” Marianne could hear the cocked brow as she paused by the door. “Like this?” Then there was a pop of displaced air and a gasp from the ELF.

“A bubble is simply a warp in space-time. For some reason - and no we aren’t sure why even now - being placed in a bubble opens the human mind to the higher dimensions necessary to manipulate bubbles. White and Black bubbles are merely the most simple of these. Our wings are manifestations of the more complex permutations. With them we can manipulate gravity, create what you would call force-fields, and create bubbles of slow rather than static time.”

“Jezus. Why the hell do you need me?”

The next room was quiet, the only sounds the turning of pages and the near silent drip of tears. Marianne didn’t need to glance in to know that the ELF in this room was alone, having been given time to themselves to process the new world and read the accounts of friends and family that had been de-bubbled before them and had since passed on.

Every citizen of Mars was required to keep a journal for this very reason. And though the journals were locked for as long as you were alive, they became public to the computers at death, and they gave a great deal of comfort to those who found themselves in an impossible future.

“What happened to Earth?” was the next question she heard.

“There are still humans there. Not everyone left or was bubbled. But they mostly live deep in the interior, away from the oceans. The crystals are still there, warping everything that gets close. They prevent all advanced mechanical technology from working, so the human societies have mostly returned to barbarism. But the planet itself is doing fine; global warming has stopped and infact begun to shift in the opposite direction. Pollution seems to be dissipating, and the animal populations that survived the original devastation are rebounding. The crystals have been good for Earth, but bad for humanity.”

“But that’s not fair!”

That wasn’t the only time Marianne was going to hear that statement. It was one of the most repeated sentences in the Awakening building, after the obvious one that began with “Where is - “ When spoken with the affronted tone the ELF in question was using Marianne had very little sympathy. This ELF clearly hadn’t felt the sting of devastation nearly as strongly as some others she had passed by. Anger she could sympathize with, though many Fairies considered the crystals the best thing to have happened to Earth. But disgust that Mars had done little to nothing to destroy the crystals was usually the next sentiment expressed by this kind of ELF, and she had no interest in listening to his bluster. Fairies were advanced, but even they had yet to understand the mysterious crystals.

“Wait, you have a crystal on Mars?”

“Yes.” The next staffer sounded as if she was explaining by route, and Marianne made a note to either give her a vacation or reassign her. “It appeared shortly after our terraforming efforts succeeded. However, it landed on the other side of the planet and we were able to alter our technology to function without mechanical components. 

That is why our technology is so different than what you remember. We do most everything with organics and bubble-tech now. Such tech is far more resistant to the crystal’s field, and we do as much as we can with manual labor to prevent serious accidents.”

“Is that why you brought me out? To be manual labor?”

“Essentially, yes.”

Marianne shut the conversation out before hearing another “not fair” from an entitled Earthling. Painters and artisans, farmers and caregivers were all useful skills in the modern Mars. Roland would say the ELFs should be grateful they were being used at all, but the true unfairness was being discussed further down the hall.

“Mars is a hereditary monarchy with a council elected from among the other Fairy families. Leaders generally rule for 100 years, before abdicating to one of their children and remaining as either councilors or going into a semi-retirement. It is not uncommon for members of the Fairy court to bubble themselves for a few centuries and return when the world has need for their special expertise. 

“The current royal family is led by King Dagda, while the Armed Forces is overseen by his daughter Princess Marianne. The second Princess, Dawn, is a major patron of this facility. The council is lead by 5 High Councilors which oversee the rest, with 60 members of the upper house and 180 members in the lower house. As an ELF you may only be elected to the lower house, but you will be expected to vote in your industry’s elections.”

History lessons, of the sort that Marianne had memorized as a child, coming from dozens of rooms around her, most saying the exact same things. She flipped through them quickly.

“Mars has a population of a little over 20 million. It was partially terraformed in the second century After Earth, and fully terraformed by a.e. 500. However the oxygen content is much less than that of your home planet, roughly equivalent to that of high altitudes. If you work on the trees, it is recommended that you carry a leaf-rebreather. Similarly, gravity is about ⅓ that of Earth, and it will take some time to -”

“There are no remaining native Martian species, though some have been brought back through careful cloning. But Earthling species have been modified just as humans have. Genetically modified animals include Mammoths, dragon-riders, and cheshires. Insects may be larger than you expect, though they are nothing compared to the spiders used on our space colonies. Be aware that every creature on Mars has been specifically designed for a purpose so - “

“Water on Mars is rare and largely imported from space. The surface is arid, with artificial canyons providing water. Yes, we know early humans saw canyons from space, sometimes you did have good ideas.”

“The original underground cities are largely abandoned. There has been no need for upkeep since successful terraforming and such places are incredibly dangerous. Every year dozens of ELFs and quite a few Fairies are killed while exploring the under-cities. Please be aware - “

“How does our economy work?”

At this Marianne paused, forcing herself to listen, though she knew what was coming. Her mother had always insisted on it.

“Simply put, we have everything you could need. Food, water, sunlight, air; all that is free. Much better than what you had back on Earth, I imagine.”

The voice was familiar. It was Harold, one of Roland’s cronies. Of course someone like him would revel in taking the harshest part of Awakening.

“You are not required to work. If you wish, you can laze about just like you did back on your planet. Your skills are useful to us - that’s why you were Awakened - but you can be replaced, and we won’t send you back into your bubble unless you want to go.

“However - “ and Marianne shivered as she stood, just out of sight of the door, hearing the lizard smile in the Fairy’s voice. 

“If you wish to see your family again, you will need to work.”

She could almost hear the heart of the poor ELF snap, and hers twinged in sympathy.

“Karen, is it? It says here you have a wife and three daughters. Children are ten years of labor each. _Martian_ years, that is, which are about double the Earth year. Luckily, your wife only takes five, assuming she can work when she’s de-bubbled.”

He barreled on over the beginnings of the ELF’s protests. 

“Don’t worry about the length of time, though. Ten years can also buy youth supplements, and you can always choose to care for yourself rather than family. Or switch on and off. If you are successful, you might be able to bring your whole family back. Some of our most productive ELFs spend centuries pulling their whole family out of bubbles, but I always wonder what’s the point if you can’t enjoy life. The choice is yours, of course. You’ll have plenty of time to think it over.”

There was silence from the ELF woman, the kind of frozen, brittle silence that came before a cacophonous shattering of anger. Harold was smiling, he probably even looked kindly, though Marianne knew his father’s fortune was based on ELF labor. 

Marianne moved on quickly then, before the tears or anger came. There was a reason her mother had taken she and Dawn here every year on their birthdays. Roland had thought it was because Queen Juniper wished her daughters to feel superior to the pathetic Earthlings - just the way most Fairies did - but instead they had gained her fierce conviction that this was _wrong_ and that no person, ELF or Fairy, should ever be forced to slave for the chance to see their family again.

If just to drive the point home, as Marianne left the Awakening wing, intent upon returning to the silence of the catacombs, she saw a reunion. 

The old ELF she had seen earlier stood and his eyes lit up. A young blond ELF was being released; her handshake all that was needed to confirm that she was accepting her new life.

“Sen?” 

The woman turned, eyes scanning the room but jumping over the old man.

“Sen.” He spoke again, and moved forward. “It’s me, Izumi.”

Her eyes widened, and now she rushed to him, eyes beginning to water.

“Izumi! What - what happened to you?”

“Sen!” The man gathered her into his arms, grip tight despite his age. “It’s been so long. I had to get our children out first. I’m so sorry.”

She shook her head into his shoulder. “No, I understand. I would have done the same.”

“They’re here now. I told them stories about you every day so they would remember. Sakura has children of her own now, see?”

The young mother stood and walked over, hesitant. “Mom?”

The woman turned and gasped. “Sakura? You’re - “ 

“Ami would have been here, but she’s at school. She’s fifteen now. I’m thirty five. And dad…”

“Eighty. In Earth years. Sakura’s older than I was when we were bubbled but - “

“I don’t care!” Sen insisted, gathering her family to her. “I love you. All of you. I don’t care how long I had to wait!” 

Marianne turned away, pain curling in her gut. She had seen the contract Sen had signed, promising to work to regain her husband’s health before she had even seen him. That kind of faith - that kind of love - was everything she had wanted. What she once had, in the form of her perfect shining knight.

Now she had a restraining order keyed into her shields to keep the man that she had loved away. Needed to, because he stalked her every moment and manufactured dangers so he had the excuse to override her protocols and rush to her side. He showed how hollow his love was, but now every day more and more of her people sided with him, won over by the same beauty that had blinded her. 

And she could never explain why she had chosen so suddenly to break the engagement, to call off the wedding and scandalize a whole world. Because she had found out his true nature by violating his privacy in the most heinous way. She had read his journal.

But that was all that had saved her. 

So she fled from the bitter-sweet reunion, back down into the darkness, away from light and love and everything that her home was supposed to support. Maybe, just maybe, she could forget for a bit how her people took love and twisted it into ugliness, just as Roland had, if she stayed in the darkness alone, surrounded by nothing but memories and bubbles. Here, at least, Roland would never dare to sabotage. It was the safest, most secure place on the planet.

Which is why it was rather strange when, two hours later, she found a mechanical cockroach stealing through the halls.


	2. Suni Dai

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Suni Dai has the unique misfortune of being both an ELF and a specialist in the most archaic art known to man: Public Relations. Specifically, he is the personal secretary for Princess Dawn. If managing her social calendar and dates wasn't hard enough, he has to keep an eye on her lazy body-guard, Roland. Who might just be a bit more observant than he seems...

Princess Dawn was reading stories to the children.

At least, that was how Suni thought of it. He was an E.L.F, and so couldn’t help slipping into Earth thinking occasionally.

Like now. Before him, sitting elegantly upon a dais, bathed in weak sunlight and surrounded by children, Dawn was speaking aloud. Without his glasses, that was all he saw, but the children gasped with wonder and awe as they perceived the pictures Dawn painted in their minds.

Well, not directly in their minds. But most Fairies had a subconscious connection to the massive computer network that ran through all of Mars. ELFs could request eye upgrades to allow them to see as Fairies did, which is why the group before Dawn was equally ELF and Fairy, with a smattering of other sorts of children as well.

Suni had an allergy to the sprays, though, and had to depend upon ancient technology to bolster his dull earth senses. He would have to tune his glasses to the exact private channel Dawn was using and concentrate hard to see even half of what the children saw.

But he didn’t need to see the fantastical landscapes and amazing creatures Dawn conjured up for her students. Her voice alone was enough to enrapture him. High, clear, and full of emotion, Dawn could awaken a stone with her stories. He could listen to her all day and never be tired.

But today he had a job to do. So he settled his glasses more firmly on his dark face and returned to updating her itinerary, managing her media presence and curating her messages, and all the while keeping an eye on her useless body-guard.

Roland was supposedly everything a Fairy should be. Tall, broad shouldered and regal, with a perfect smile and immaculate blond hair, he was the one everyone wished to be King. Acting as bodyguard to the Royal Princesses seemed a fitting task for a man of such potential.

But Suni sided with Marianne on the issue of her ex-fiance for purely practical reasons. While Suni answered Dawn's messages and planned out her daily schedule, he was also scanning the local security networks and tracking any suspicious movement; exactly what Roland  _ should _ be doing, except for the fact that the Fairy Knight was gazing off into the distance, bored look on his face whenever his eyes focused enough on the scene before him to even register the Princess. Suni  _ knew _ he was stalking Marianne through the network, and as the man gave out a snort of irritation Suni could guess that the future Queen had once again shoved Roland out of her personal system.

Out of the corner of his eye Suni watched as Roland’s handsome face darkened and his fingers began to twitch, a sure sign that he was using his Armed Forces clearances to hack his way back into Marianne’s system and somehow into her good graces.

Never-mind that Suni was no soldier, never-mind that he was an ELF, at least he was capable of doing his  _ job _ . He was the Princess's aid, and Roland was supposed to be her protector for the day. But if anyone ever caught Roland shirking his duties the perfect prince would just smile and claim that  _ he _ could protect two princesses at once, and really, what harm could  _ Dawn  _ ever come to?

Suni mentally gritted his teeth at the thought, but kept his face pleasant and polite. It wouldn’t do to grimace around the children, especially with the few Fairy parents in the audience sneering each time they caught sight of him. Suni’s mere existence was bad enough; then he had to go and become personal assistant to the second Princess, stealing the job from half a dozen under-qualified but well-connected Fairy candidates. Many would jump at the chance to see him re-bubbled and his corrupting influence - the same influence that supposedly pushed Dawn into allowing ELF children into her story circle - safely contained.

Suni wasn’t sure which was more impossible; the thought that he would ever do anything to harm Dawn, or that she was so weak willed as to be swayed by someone like him. But he could understand the distaste. After all, Suni wasn’t just an ELF, but the most archetypical ELF imaginable. He was small and dark; tiny from malnourishment as a child and dark in a way that wasn’t ‘exotic’ enough for the elites to find handsome. He had no apparent talents, no skill with the brush or ladle, and jealous Fairies of the court were always eager to point out that he had been the last of his brothers and sisters to be Awakened. Even his mother recognized him as useless, they said, though Suni had never begrudged her for her practical actions until those actions were constantly thrown in his face.

In his worse moments, Suni sometimes wondered if Dawn would have even noticed him had he not grown up at her side, the only playmate who was so unimportant that he could be trusted with all the secrets the court would have loved to get their hands on.

_ But that doesn’t matter _ he told himself for the hundredth time that day. The sneers and rolled eyes were nothing when compared to Dawn’s smile, and his every action made that smile more likely.

So when the story finally concluded with cheers and swoons from the children he was ready. While the applause ran its course - enthusiastic from the children, polite from the adults - he sent over the next few events of the day; a private lunch with the handsome Fairy Leon, a meeting with a committee of ELFs wishing for the King’s ear, and tea with a group of the court ladies.

While Dawn accepted praise from parents and asked about the children’s studies she was also confirming and editing her itinerary, modifying it here and there and sending quick messages back to Suni.

He tried not to smile too broadly at the emoji and sparkles she managed to add to every message, even if it was only for his eyes.

_“Tone the walls more green for the meeting, Suni. Most of the committee members are from the high trees; they’ll appreciate the cooler colors after spending so much time in the sun! Thanks! <3”_

_“Ooooh, switch out the Assam for prickly pear juice. We’ve just got a new crop in and I can’t wait to see Madam Honeybum’s face when she realizes she’s been grimacing at her own product! XD”_

_ “Leon? No, I don’t want to have a date with  Leon .  _ Aaron  _ is the handsome one!” _

At the last message Suni winced. As much as he loved her, managing the young men in Dawn’s life was a nightmare. Quickly he sent a request to Aaron, pulling up the messages the young noble had written Dawn in the last few months and sent them over to refresh her memory, along with a quick summary of his relations and their businesses. Then he drew up a map, noting where Leon was approaching and gauging how quickly Aaron would walk if he could guarantee an audience with the princess.

Six minutes, more or less, given that the Fairy boy would not wish to seem too eager, and that he was likely skimming through all his information on the princess just as she was doing for him.

Which meant that he had to stall Leon  _ now _ .

A timer began counting in Suni’s mind, and at the corner of his glasses. Four minutes until Dawn finished with the audience, but Leon’s parents would ensure that they were the last to speak with her. So a minute and a half before Leon arrived to be introduced.

Carefully Dawn drew out the conversations with the other parents while Suni moved casually through the crowd to the path Leon would be coming down. He ruffled the hair of ELF children who were almost taller than he was, and dodged not-so-subtly hidden tripping hazards left by Fairy brats.

He timed it right, and intercepted Leon just as his parents began looking around for him.

“Sir? About the - “ without a pause he checked the general event calendar for the next event Leon and Dawn would see each other. “Riding party next week? Princess Dawn was wondering what kind of dragon you will be using.”

“What does it matter?” The Fairy boy asked, craning his head around Suni’s hair to see where Dawn had disappeared to.

“Well, the Princess was rather hoping that we would have a rainbow of wings, and she mentioned that you had a fine red mount that would be perfect to lead the procession.”

Leon paused, long enough that Suni knew he was checking his stables for the imagined mount. “What? Oh, yes. Delicious. Er, that’s the name of the Fly, I mean.” Suni imagined that right at this moment a new mount was being requested for the Balderdash family stables, the best that their prestige could afford, and the name changes being pushed through according to the boy’s whims. A crafty look grew on his face and he added, “What will Dawn be riding? Wouldn’t want to look better than her, right?”

_ Of course you want to look better than her _ . Suni thought to himself.  _ You don’t get a chance to show up the royal house often.  _ But he said,

“I believe Dawn will be riding a white Dragon-fly with blue wings.”

“Ah, then we’ll match. Perfect. Now out of my way, ELF, I have a date with your mistress.”

Suni bowed and the fairy pushed past, only to be met by glowers from his parents. Dawn had already left, graciously taking Aaron’s arm and waltzing away to her private lunch. Suni would be best gone before Leon remembered who to blame for his perceived failure. Now which way had she gone…

For a moment Suni froze, Dawn having disappeared from his map. Terrible fears flashed before his eyes, before he remembered that the easiest route to the lunch pavilion would take her beneath The Queen’s Room and thus out of signal range. He heaved a sigh of relief and began hurrying after her.

 

\----

 

One of the benefits of not having an internal connection to the ‘net was easily being able to see short-cuts. Where most would merely see walls and planters, empty windows and artfully constructed tapestries, Suni saw openings everywhere. Here there was a servants’ entrance, hidden behind a screen of fake ivy and built with the short stature of most ELF’s in mind. There was an opening half way up the tall walls, perfect for a flying Armed Forces fairy, only visible to those who had clearance...and Suni, who could see the bones of the palace each time he looked over the edges of his glasses. Everywhere was augmented with great digital art, hung up on the bare stonework, set next to physical paintings and sculpture.

Most ELFs and Fairies would never notice the difference between real and projection, except perhaps as a medium notation upon the plaque that hung by each piece. And no-one would think to remove their glasses to see the passages hidden in plain sight. If they did, most would think - correctly - that such places were restricted if they could not regularly see them.

Perhaps only the royal family had a true map to the palace; everyone else merely seeing what their clearance allowed them. Soldiers saw one map, servants another, guests a third. But Suni had pieced together something close a full picture through trial and error over the years.

So when he needed to catch up to Dawn he skirted the public areas, moving quickly through the courts and walking paths of the Fairies and their Courtiers. These areas were beautiful, an equal number open to the elements and lightly covered by shade-trees and lattice pavilions. Suni didn’t stopped to marvel at the stone, grown into formation in the same way ancient gardeners had grown hedges into fantastical shapes. The palace itself was far more impressive; towering four dozen stories high and looking as if it had been grown from spun stone.

He ducked through an entrance hall quickly, though it was difficult to tell the difference from inside and out, given the immensely high ceilings and ‘net-screened windows. Luckily he only had to dodge his fellow ELFs; any fairy on business simply flew through the palace. It had been designed with their proportions in mind, after all. To his eye the hall was built from creamy red stone, laced through with local crystal and minerals, but the others saw whatever overlay their eyes were keyed for: the servants saw something quite similar to him, unless they had a particularly nasty supervisor or a vindictive fairy brat who could turn the rooms into dark dungeons or arid deserts; Fairies could see whatever their minds wished, within reason and with the knowledge that when the King wished to make a speech everyone saw the palace as  _ he  _ wanted - usually tall and shining and white, for King Dagda was an old-fashioned man who stuck to the classics.

From there Suni slipped into a servants’ entrance, nodding briefly to a brother’s-fiance’s-cousin’s-aunt (at least, that’s what his relation chart told him) who worked in the kitchens. Her eyes glanced over him, and he wondered if her supervisor did not allow outside conversation among their workers. Alternatively, Hanita might simply dislike him. Just as many ELFs hated Suni for his role as Fairies, and for the similar reason of his perceived weakness in comparison to other candidates. It was difficult to convince anyone that his complete lack of importance was the very reason King Dagda allowed an ELF to stay so near his flighty daughter.

Suni tried not to be hurt by the slight and hurried up a hidden pair of stairs to a guard corridor that ran perpendicular to the servants’ hall. This one was stark, seemingly cut directly into the red stone but with a high arched ceiling for the flying members of the Armed Forces.

Sometimes Suni wondered what a map of the palace would look like with all the secret passages included. It was already seemed more air than stone thanks to clever tricks of light and ‘net-screens, but it might be true in fact, with every wall hiding at least a few extra corridors. Some of the corridors weren’t even in the walls, merely hidden by screens, though Suni could bet that even without the immaterial walls the Fairies wouldn’t see the hurrying ELFs.

Before finally reaching the lunch pavilion on the twelfth floor Suni took two more servant’s corridors and six more guard paths. The first servant’s hall was a gardener’s and Suni needed to edge around plants from all over Earth and dozens genetically engineered for Mars. Then he took a kitchen elevator, normally reserved only for food for the fairy elites, to Dawn’s wing. Presumably her lunch would be following shortly thereafter. That deposited him right before Dawn’s lunch balcony, which had a view befitting a Princess.

The whole trip had taken him a little less than six minutes; far shorter than that of a regular ELF, who might be commandeered by any Fairy who saw them, never mind their responsibilities.

As it was, he appeared just as Dawn rounded the corner, Aaron in toe, and all his work was rewarded by the look in her face when she saw him.

Dawn  _ beamed _ . Her bright, sweet face erupted into a smile, blue eyes twinkling and cheeks dimpling as she saw her friend.

Aaron’s face fell as Dawn dropped his arm and hurried to Suni, saying, “ _ How _ did you beat me here? I saw you still in the garden ten minutes ago!”

“A butler has his ways, Princess.” On any other man the words would have seemed condescending, but Suni flushed and ducked his eyes, the words spoken from somewhere beneath his collar.

“You’ll have to show me those  _ ways _ sometime, ELF.” Aaron said, smoothly trying to take Dawn’s hand again.

The Princess chuckled and tapped her date reprovingly on the arm. “One doesn’t ask a man to give up his secrets, Count! I don’t need to know  _ how _ Suni does it, just that he will always be there when I need him.” Never-mind that she had grown up in the walls just as Suni had, and was alone in knowing his secrets, just as he was alone in knowing hers.

Aaron’s smile hardened as he stared down at the ELF who had stole the Princess’s smile. “One would hardly think you would need an ELF for something so simple as lunch.”

Suni’s smile looked far more genuine than Aaron’s, if just from years of long practice. “I am merely here to open the door, Lord Aaron. And to take any extra requests for lunch.”

“I can call a servant on my own, I assure you. Begone.”

Suni bowed low, reminding himself that in some cultures keeping one’s eyes off an enemy was a high insult (never mind other cultures that thought it was a sign of high respect. An ELF took insults one could get).

When he glanced up he saw Dawn rolling her eyes behind Aaron’s back, and any bruised feelings disappeared with the message she sent saying, “What a  _ boor _ ! And a bore too! Sunny, strike him from my schedule. Mr. Right had better not  _ ever _ treat my friends like that!”

 

\------

 

While Dawn ate and made small talk with Aaron, Suni found himself wandering the route she had taken, through the wide, impressive halls, half-open windows reflecting a million colors on grey stone and green marble and pale red sandstone, giving each room its own ever-changing rainbow. 

He came out in the Queen’s Room, one of the largest rooms in the whole palace. Here the walls were white, but not the cold white of some of the outer pavilions, but rather the warm, living white of milk and cream, accented with gold. Wide columns graced the walls.

The room always reminded Suni of pictures he’d seen of ancient cathedrals. Catholic, not the intricately decorated mosques of his mother’s faith, but not so cold. There was even what looked like an alter, taking up the whole back wall, showing a bright, rising woman with wings closer to angels than fairies.

The king sometimes gave speeches here, so there was a gold dais just below the clear crystal bubble the stature held in her soft marble hands. There were cushions scattered on the floor and chairs in the various balconies that looked into the room, just like the one he was on now. Stairs were cleverly concealed into the columns, but he did not descend, wishing to remain on hand should Dawn need him.

Of all the rooms in the Palace, this was the only one used equally by Fairies and ELFs, as the Queen would have wanted. The main audience chamber was off this room and each member of the Royal Family had a private balcony which lead into their personal rooms. In many ways this room was the center of the Palace. And thus, to a certain extent, it was the center of Mars.

Suni rested his hands on the low wall of the balcony and looked at the Queen, for that was who the statue portrayed, in all her regal glory. She was so like Dawn. The sculpture had captured the warmth in her smile and the kindness in her eyes. The bubble in her hands might as well be the whole of Mars, for her love for her home had been legendary, and the loving way she cradled it reminded all, Fairy and ELF alike, of the space they held in her heart.

Suni barely remembered the Queen, and saw her now mostly through reflections in Dawn. She had been a kind woman, with warm hands and a open smile. But the statue did not capture the firmness he remembered, preferring to only show the softness and love, not the will of steel that both of her daughters had inherited. Easier, perhaps, to remember the warm woman rather than the steel that had lead her to bubble herself for her convictions.

“She was the Heart of this kingdom, you know.”

Suni started from his daze, surprised to have his thoughts echoed by  _ Roland _ of all people. The man had snuck up on him somehow, probably flying from one of the other balconies.

“Dawn looks like her.” was all Suni said.

“As does Marianne.”

Suni squinted, but couldn’t see it. Marianne took after her father in everything, from coloring to temperament, which was likely one of the reasons the eldest Princess and the King often got in legendary rows. In some ways, the arguments were the closest relation Marianne had to her mother.

“Beautiful. Fragile. Like a flower in the sun.”

All certainly true of Dawn. But...Marianne? The  _ Warrior _ Princess? But Suni kept his comments to himself. It wouldn't do to insult the captain of the guard.

Roland smiled sadly. “I love her, you know.”

That, at least, Suni could understand. He looked back to the statue. “Yeah.”

“If only I could win her heart again. If only...If only there was a potion that could make her see me for what I  _ really am _ .”

Suni didn’t see the calculating look Roland gave him out of the corner of his eye. Instead he sighed forlornly, Roland’s words hitting close to home and making the knight hide a smile.

“Yeah. But nothing like that exists.”

“Don’t be so sure, ELF. What if I told you a way to win her heart did exist?”

Suni looked up at the Fairy Knight. “I’d say you’re crazy. And guilty of treason if you think I’d ever let someone douse a member of the Royal Family with a potion to force their will!”

Roland held up his hands. “No, no! Nothing like that! The mere  _ thought _ !”

The ELF raised a brow. “Then what, then?”

“What if I told you there was a potion that could de-bubble anyone?”

“I’d say you just have to go to the Awakening building and ask for who ever you want.”

“Not just an ELF or lesser Fairy.  _ Anyone _ .” Roland paused, and looked meaningfully towards the alter. “Even someone who no-one else can reach.”

Suni’s eyes went wide, and he looked towards the crystal globe.

“Anyone? Even…”

“Even the Heart of Mars. Wouldn’t that be enough to make any girl love you? If you brought back her mother?”

 


	3. Goblins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But what _are_ Goblins? And how could they fit into the oh-so-perfect world of the Fairies? In a world where everyone has their place and only the beautiful rise to power, how could anything ugly ever be allowed to survive?

Every society needs boogiemen, even Mars. From before humans were human they had told little ones of the dangers of the dark, of fierce beasts and grasping hands. 

Mars had its dangers just like any other world. Where once humans had feared heights and the cold of space, now the dangers were from bubble accidents and faulty augmented realities. Bubbles could be lost, or a fairy insulted enough to terrorize a whole family. Often a child could not understand the reasons for the rules, but they could be given an appropriate monster to scare them into compliance.

And it happened that Mars had one readily available.

 

\---------

 

Marianne thought of this as she followed the strange device deeper into the catacombs. 

Fairies, in general, avoided mechanical devices. The more complex a machine, the more likely it was to fail should it fall into a Crystal field. Organics were far more resilient,so fairy tech was mostly a combination of bubble power sources and bio-machines with the minimal amount of metal in any given device.

But the tiny cockroach that trundled down the corridor was completely mechanical and a work of art beyond. Marianne had never seen its like, and that alone would have led her to follow it into the dark. Wondering about its origin was what led her to pull her wings tight around her, easing out of gravity and bending the grey light around her into invisibility. She had no idea what sensors the cockroach held, so it was better to be safe. Who knew what it would do if it realized it was being watched.

Silently she followed it, toes barely touching the metal floor to push her forward in a loping bounce. Outside she would fly, but the cockroach was so small she was afraid she’d lose sight of it in the gloom.

Deeper and deeper she followed the toy into the catacombs, so far that any but her would have been lost. No one but her visited this deep, or so she had thought. Yet the roach seemed certain as it navigated its way deeper, only occasionally pausing to swing its eyes towards the labels on the jars of the lowest shelf.

That in itself was strange, though not as strange as the direction the cockroach was traveling. Any creature connected to the ‘net would be able to track their progress through the bubble-vault; the data easily accessible on the logic that anyone who had the clearance to be in the vault would also have the authority to read the histories and stories of the ELFs stored there. But this creature actually  _ read _ the labels, some so old that the ink was barely legible despite the carefully temperature controlled climate. 

Deeply strange, but also clever, given that the over’net would register any unexpected activity. And this was certainly unexpected. Had Marianne not already had a good idea where the cockroach was going, she would have been completely perplexed.

The little creature had long passed the ‘popular’ bubbles, those of actors and politicians, people who were brought out often for interviews or autographs and then returned just as quickly. It passed by the doctors and scientists and artists of all sorts, those brought closer to the front in case they were needed on short notice. And it kept going, passed the rows of children, of the poor who were high on potential but low on education, of those who had intentionally been left behind by their family (like Suni’s father, who had been relegated to the depths by joint agreement by his whole family, and quickly replaced by a kind Ethiopian chef who everyone far preferred,  _ especially _ Ma Dai). And then on, passed all the people with professions and skills that no Martian had need of; unpopular politicians, lawyers, generals and mercenaries and managers.

No, none of these were what the cockroach wanted, and so Marianne was not surprised when it trundled and clicked its way passed seven billion people without so much as a second glance. It only paused as it approached the very, very far reaches of the vault, miles underground and quieter than the grave. 

Here were the damaged bubbles. The ones that had given rise to Goblins.

 

\----------- 

 

_“Don’t go outside after dark.”_ Marianne remembered her father telling her as a child. _“Or else the Goblins will steal you away.”_

_ “Eat all your food, or else the Goblins will eat  _ you _.”_ Ma Dai had said, ladeling more lentils into her bowl. 

_“Never explore the old tunnels._ ” Her tutor warned. _“That’s where the Goblins live.”_

_“Sleep sound, else you’ll turn into a Goblin!”_ from Dawn, repeating what her nursemaid said over and over.

___“Always watch the shadows…”_  
_“Never ask questions…”_   
_“Don’t look for old cities…”_

Countless warnings, repeated by mothers and fathers and teachers to every child across the planet. As an adult it all sounded the same to Marianne.  _ Fear the dark _ .  _ Don’t step out of line. Don’t question the way things are _ .

Only her mother seemed immune to it.

“Make your bubble strong, dear. Protect yourself from the radiation.”

“But  _ why _ mummy? Isn’t radiation what gave us wings?”

“Our powers come from the other-space. Where you go when you’re in a dark-bubble. But a bad bubble can let bad things in, things that hurt you and will make you come out different. That’s how goblins are made, sweetheart.”

The little Marianne hadn’t believed it. “I thought goblins were ELFs who were really bad and got what’s com’n to ‘em. That’s what Roland says.”

Her mother’s beautiful face had clouded and her lips drew into a thin line. then she put her hands on Mariannes cheeks and looked deep into her daughter's eyes. 

“Listen to me, Marianne. The Goblins and ELFs have done nothing wrong. You must remember that. The only thing they chose was to come here, and entrust their fate to us. It is  _ we _ who have wronged them, by keeping them in bubbles too long and putting them at risk. Someday we will open all the bubbles, and free all the ELFs, even the Goblins. It is our  _ duty _ as stewards of humanity. Promise you will remember this, Marianne. This is our duty.”

Queen Juniper’s words had resonated with Marianne, even as a child, taking up residence in  her mind despite not truly understanding what her mother meant. The words  _ duty _ and  _ fate _ took a place in her heart long after her mother had turned her back on Mars in despair and left her daughter to fight alone.

One day Marianne would be Queen of Mars, just like her mother before her. When that day came she would rule more than just the citizens of the light. She would rule all her citizens fairly.

Even the goblins. She had a duty.

And for too long had rulers ignored the plight of those who hid in darkness.

\--------- 

As an adult, Marianne knew that Goblins came from damaged bubbles, ones that had not been made properly. The fault was rare, affecting perhaps a tenth of one percent of the dark stasis-bubbles. Most such bubbles came from cities near where the crystals had landed, leading many to believe that it was the crystal’s anti-technology field that caused the faults, not human error. Whatever originally caused it, the faults even appeared in later bubbles, those better insulated and better constructed. Far less frequently now, especially with the lower population loads of Mars, but still something worth warning unruly children of. 

No one knew exactly what caused the Goblin mutations. Fairy mutations were almost all mental, coming from the mind opening to higher dimensions through an intense experience with one. Goblin mutations were physical, leading warped bodies and twisted features. The general theory was that radiation leaked into improperly shielded bubbles, but that did not seem to account for just how  _ changed _ Goblins were. Nor the fact that they generally survived the transition, despite often looking like completely different species. 

Marianne was partial to the theory that some bubbles shifted into an alternate reality, rather than simply failing to pull the inhabitant completely out of space-time. It would explain why so many goblins came back with memories that weren’t quite their own, and dreams they couldn’t explain. Perhaps in this other reality they really were frogs, or fish, or strange long dead insects.

But it had been centuries since any goblin had been Awoken. The computers had learned to recognize the faulty bubbles, and the fairy council had decided to remove all Goblin bubbles from the awakening roster. The  _ creatures _ that came out could hardly be recognized as once-human, and they rarely integrated well into society surrounded by ‘normal’ ELFs and Fairies. No matter the genius a goblin possessed, they were deemed too dangerous to bring into the light.

Yet somehow they survived, hiding out in the old underground cities, supposedly stealing misbehaving children and forcing them into faulty bubbles so they could grow their population. Other stories simply said that missing children were eaten. Marianne doubted both, given that the old cities were famous for their near-indestructible hydroponics systems which once had fed a Martian population triple the size it was now. More likely the goblins only raided when they needed medical supplies or a bit of sunlight. Or perhaps they liked terrifying the rest of the Martians. Marianne certainly couldn't blame them for the latter. 

But the question still remained - how were the Goblins breeding? There was no doubt they were still down there, even centuries after the ban, and so many goblins were infertile that without the advanced bio-medicine of the Fairies it would almost be impossible to have children. 

Marianne suspected she had just answered that question. 

 

\--------

 

Finally, the cockroach stopped, in a dusty corner that Marianne herself had never visited. The clean, careful care the rest of the facility received was apparently forgotten here, some jars merely piled against the back wall, their labels obscured and unreadable to the computers. Lost, forever. The sight made Marianne grimace behind her shield of invisibility. She had told the staff, over and over again, to at least find shelves for the Goblin bubbles, but even in a world of limitless resources apparently that was too much.

But here there were tracks in the dust, not fairy-light footsteps, but the tiny trail the cockroach left behind. As her eyes adjusted to the light, Marianne saw other such tracks, paralleling them into other dusty and abandoned corners. So this was not the first time the creature had snuck into the depths of the Bubble repository. 

Now it was moving slower, and Marianne hung back, allowing gravity to ease further on her body and float her to the low ceiling. Elsewhere the bubble racks towered, but here the rock of Mars could be seen, and she slipped a hand out to hold the rough stone and anchor herself out of sight and sound.

The cockroach clicked to itself and examined the shelf before it. The jars and data Marianne could see were in a jumble, with ELFs from all different areas and backgrounds and families all lined up together, all order lost after the computers had been instructed to simply move the damaged bubbles  _ away _ ; out of sight and memory, if the Council had its way.

But the cockroach seemed to know what it wanted. It - or at least its master - was looking for something specific. After a moment of mechanical calculation it clicked again and skittered to the edge of the shelf, then began to climb. Despite herself, Marianne felt a chill of revulsion; for a moment the creature looked  _ too _ real, and instincts that had never been needed on Mars flinched away. 

There were no cockroaches on Mars. There was no need for them, with decay done far more efficiently through composting and specially designed creatures. Marianne only knew the creature from old history textbooks and warnings for anyone who wished to visit Earth. But whoever had designed the mechanical roach had  _ intentionally _ chosen its look. They were laying claim to one of the most despised parts of Earth, a thing that every ELF reviled and Fairies took as proof of barbarism. And they had made something brilliant from it, something that moved and darted just like the real thing. Marianne was impressed, now that she got a clearer look. 

It found the correct shelf and dove in, disappearing from sight and into the depths. Marianne tracked its position, listening close to its clicking and occasionally seen a flash of reflected light as it brightened its eyes just enough to read a label.

Barely thirty seconds later it stopped, and there was a cautious clinking as it began returning to the corridor, pulling a jar behind it. Clink Clink, then a pause, then two more Clinks, and another pause. If Marianne had not been directly overhead the sound would have been swallowed by the silence of the crypt. 

It reached the edge of the shelf and looked looked back, satisfied that not a jar was out of place except the one it had extricated. Then carefully, carefully, it maneuvered the jar onto its back and climbed down to the floor. Behind it there was no sign that the roach had ever been there. 

When it reached the ground it opened the jar, sniffing first with its antenna, then reaching in and grasping the black bubble with its mandibles. Not an easy task, given how light and slippery bubbles were, but the cockroach had no trouble. Then, in an act Marianne had not anticipated at all, the cockroach  _ swallowed _ the bubble. Seeming content with the act, it turned back to the jar, secured its top, then spat a thin spray of liquid at the label. Ink ran and Marianne sensed whatever chip had been implanted in the label decay as well. Whoever had been in the bubble, their information was now lost, unless someone physically found the jar.

Which would be difficult, as the next thing the cockroach did was push the jar beneath the shelf, the top coming loose again and looking for all the world as if the jar had fallen on its own and its bubble rolled away into the aether.

As the cockroach turned and began back the way it came, Marianne glanced around the vault, noting other jars on the floor beneath shelves or stuffed into odd corners. Even some of the piles looked as if they had empty jars, added to the sides and sporting just a bit less dust than the others.

So how long  _ had  _ the Goblins been doing this? And was she really the first one who had noticed it?


	4. The Imp

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What can you say to a fairy with a quest? Certainly not "no", as Suni knows all too well. But what could possibly help him through the maze of the underground? Preferably without getting drowned or eaten by monster cats.

Plans from Roland were always clever, Suni had to admit that. The man appeared like a complete fop to even some of his most enthusiastic supporters, so it was easy to forget that something had kept the man a staple of the court for centuries, and it wasn’t just his charisma. He exuded confidence and power, and seemed to always find innovative solutions to problems others might never have thought of.

Though somehow it seemed that Roland never was the one trudging through freezing underground tunnels on the way into goblin territory. Perhaps it wasn’t his cleverness or charisma that made him special, but his ability to delegate.

And, once again, Suni had fallen for it. 

“I have here a map to the last known store of the Potion.” Roland had explained. “All you have to do is go get it.”

“And why can’t _you_ come with me?” Suni had asked, trying to keep his instinct towards insubordination out of his voice.

“Why, because I’m too big! Some of those tunnels are tiny - even for a fairy child. Only someone like you could fit through them. I’ll stay here and guide you as best I can, and send help if you take too long.”

Which was how Suni had ended up five miles underground, clutching his glow-worm lamp and hoping against hope that Roland’s data had been right and that no-one would flush the water-pipes he was traveling through.

Roland’s com-link had cut off ten minutes ago, and Suni was trying to be charitable and believe that Roland had not know that would happen. The man was the epitome of a Fairy Ass but knowingly sending someone into Goblin territory without backup was a bit much, even for him...right?

But the further Suni traveled, the more convinced he was that Roland had at least spoke the truth when he said that only someone like Suni could come down here. Not just because of his size, though there were turns that even Suni had difficulty getting through, but because of the illusions.

The faded augmented realities hung thick in the stale air, broken and forgotten programs that had been shunted off into the darkness rather than ever properly turned off. With his glasses he could shreds of vast underground caverns, flickers of monsters, and rafting rapids. Such things were dangerous for anyone who could not easily turn off the illusions; there were holes and pitfalls and sudden drops created by time and shifting sands that the augmented reality ties hid. With maintenance the tunnels would not be too dangerous, but these were ancient systems, mostly unused now that most of Martian life took place on the surface and in the canyons. No one should be down here and if the faulty programs kept people away the Fairy government was happy to leave it be.

Suni had no idea if Roland’s map was any good. There was no way to know until he wandered face-first into a goblin den or was hit by a jet of water or sewage. It seemed that these tunnels were abandoned, and it was certainly true that any but the smallest elf would have difficulty moving through the smaller openings. But goblin-fungus grew on some of the walls, the mycelium eating into old pipes and giving off a faint glow. The heads let out clearer light and popped out of the walls at junctions and pipe crossings, strobing slowly from blue to white to green light. Others only activated after Suni had passed by, lit by the touch of moving air. 

The deeper Suni went the more debris littered the ground, all damp rotted leaf-matter that was present in tiny cleansing particles in all Martian water but only clumped when pools had been left stagnant too long. The skittering of animals increased, mostly various rodents and insects that the Fairies had once needed for decay but had long since replaced with highly targeted bacteria. He saw a colony of ants, industriously hollowing out a tree-stump. He disturbed groups of bats and blind sparrows and once heard the pad of a cheshire pass by, invisible and stalking prey that Suni could only hope was tastier than he. These were all interwoven with their own augmented realities, some keyed to specific species to make them more ‘attractive', others instinctively generated by larger brains like hive-minded bees or escaped pets.

Most he ignored, though he stayed silent and wait for the cheshire to pass, unsure of how large it was. Time in bubbles did _weird_ things to cats, more so than any animal outside of humans. Again he thanked his stars that the worst of the monsters were invisible to him if he just shut off his glasses. Now he was only keeping them on to follow the map that overlaid the shifting realities. 

He was so focused on ignoring the illusions that he didn't notice the creature sneaking up behind him until it was nearly too late. One moment he was sneaking down a corridor, listening close for the tell-tale rush of water, the next he was back-lit by a bright light and a huge shadow looming behind him. He did not even consider that there were ways of creating illusions in the real world, didn't consider that the monster could be harmless, he simply dropped to the ground and waited for the end, screaming.

\------------ 

Elsewhere on Mars, Marianne was sneaking down a corridor of her own. She was still hovering, invisible, above the scurrying cockroach, but only damn good luck had allowed her to follow it as it left the Bubble Repository.

The little creature had exited the Repository through a hole too small for anything but the tiny creature to fit through, beneath a bank of monitors close to the front of the facility. Marianne easily saw how it had managed to avoid tripping the sensors; some time in the past the new monitors had been added, bolted to the floor and the security system incorrectly re-worked around them.

Thoughtfully Marianne had modified the system to correct the oversight, but had left an instruction to allow the roach through. She did not want to alert its masters - at least not yet. Luckily her maps of the Repository were more complete than that of the normal worker or guard; compiled through her own exploration of the surrounding areas. She was able to drop her shield and run to the nearest fairy-sized entrance into the underground and catch up to the bug before it traveled too far.

The corridor Marianne was now traveling, safely back behind her invisibility shield, could not have been more different than Suni’s pipes. These were tunnels designed originally for humans. All were straight, with white tile floors and walls, darkened down to emergency lighting but still kept clean by infrequent snuffler patrols. But the roach seemed confident that it would avoid being caught by the shaggy vacuum creatures. Perhaps it - or its master - had mapped their routes. She could just barely see in the dust tracks of its earlier passing. But if the roach had left any signs of previous trips the snufflers’ brushes had long since obliterated any trace.

Not worrying about any observers, now the mechanical creature was going quickly, skittering down the corridors fast enough that Marianne had to push herself to keep up while also remaining silent: surprisingly difficult given her normally loping stride had her careening into walls every few moments. It had been a long time since she’d needed to be this sneaky and her rusty skills were obvious - at least to her. Luckily she was deep enough underground now that the walls were reflecting air-signals so no-one - Roland, her sister, the King - would be able to interrupt, or worse _record_ her antics. Still, it would only be so long that she could stay down here without arousing suspicion. So the faster the creature went, and the closer it got to its master, all the better.

But perhaps she was concentrating too hard upon not slamming into walls, because she nearly slammed into something _far_ more dangerous.

\-----------

Suni’s screams died into whimpers over the next minute, then into silence as he heard a strange snuffling sound. Cautiously he peaked through his fingers. 

Before him a huge white rat-like creature was rolling on the floor, clearly laughing its heart out. 

He flushed and climbed back to his feet, brushing the mud off his pants as best he could.

“That wasn’t very nice.” He said to the creature, trying not to sound too peevish. Just because it was small and seemed friendly didn’t mean it wasn’t hiding some strange power. Certainly it was intelligent enough for it, if it went out of its way to scare the hell out of him.

The beast - an Imp, his glasses informed him when he set them back on his face - broke off its chuckling when Suni spoke. Big white ears flickered in his direction, clearly listening.

“I’m on a mission.” He explained, not sure if the creature could understand him, “For the Queen. It’s very important, and I need to follow this map - “ he tapped his glasses “quickly so I don’t get sucked down into the sewers or eaten by goblins. So distractions are a bad thing, okay?” 

He turned to leave, only to have the creature tackle him from the back, tumbling him back down into the mud while it stole his glasses and peered through them, one eye at a time, chittering.

“Hey! Give those back!” 

The Imp shook its head, clearly dissatisfied either with Suni’s answer or whatever it saw in the glasses. Then it lightly placed the glasses in its mouth and grinned at Suni with its sharp teeth clenching the fragile device with just enough malice that Suni was scrambling after it before he even considered what a terrible, terrible idea it was.

But what choice did he have? The glasses held the only map of the underground. He might as well give up finding the potion storage unit, but without the map he’d never be able to find his way out either. His only hope was in those clear lenses, and he tried to throttle down his terror as the imp led him pell-mell down dozens of corridors. They splashed through week-old pools, jumped over cracks and ducked under roots. Suni pushed his body hard, wishing for longer legs to catch the damned creature before he became too lost, but the white blur always seemed just out of reach, dangling the glasses like a taunt for Suni to follow.

It took a few minutes before Suni heard the rumble behind him, and suddenly he wasn’t running after the Imp, but from whatever the sound was behind him. Pools rippled with the sound, and an eerie light was growing in the fungus around him. The Imp was going faster, faster, and now there were animals scurrying around them as well - little things dashing up the walls and into cracks, sealing them behind with glue-like droppings. Other creatures were appearing, strange grey frogs with blind eyes that reflected light and newts that shimmered warning colors when Suni ran over their tails. Some roots were moving too, tightening against the walls while others burst open to reveal seeds or pools of tadpoles and minnow eggs. 

Suni swore and tried to speed up again, but to no avail. Side passages were starting to close around them, ancient doors rolling shut while others opened, but all were flat and offered no protection against the coming wave. He dimly remembered half an hour of mostly flat terrain before running into the Imp; even had he remembered the way out he’d have had no chance against the water that way. 

It was only his exhaustion that saved him in the end. He had slowed at a turn, panting heavily, and chanced to glance up to find the Imp waving its thin tail from behind an open cap. It chittered when it saw him, waved the glasses again, and gestured upward.

The rumble was so close now the slippery rungs of hidden ladder vibrated beneath Suni’s hands, threatening to tip him off every step. He did slip twice, the second time only being saved by the imp’s grasping hands pulling him up and over the lip at the last moment. They didn’t have a second to rest, though, before the Imp shoved him towards the seal-cap. Groaning Suni shoved it back over the top and helped the creature fasten it down.

And not a moment too soon; he felt the water hit as they twisted the last rusty turn; the thrum of it hitting the door hard enough to tumble him backwards. the old metal groaned, rivulets running round the seams and freezing his heart.

But the door held and he collapsed backwards with a sigh. 

After a few moments to breath, the Imp appeared above him, glasses held politely between its fingers. Suni didn’t move to take it, and the Imp slid the glasses over his eyes, finishing with a pat to his hair.

Then it skittered out of sight and groaning, Suni sat up. 

“I guess I owe you a thank-you.”

The Imp paused its rummaging in their new room and mimed a shrug. Then it tapped its temple and pointed to the glasses.

Suni concentrated on whatever the Imp wanted him to see.

There were a few additions to the map, all in lurid purple sparkles and hastily scrawled imp-faces. 

One circle surrounded a time stamp, while an arrow pointed to it from another circle that contained the words “weekly flush cycle" from Roland’s debriefing. Another arrow zig-zagged alongside the route Suni had been following, and Suni could see that there were significantly more upward leading pipes on that route. Elsewhere there were bright “x"s with frowning faces to indicate danger. 

Glumly Suni examined the map. He hadn’t realized how near to danger he had been for his entire trip...and he had been half-terrified the whole time. But what was worse was the nagging certainty that was starting to grow.

“Roland would have known that the flush was today. Was he trying to kill me?”

When he looked to the Imp for a response it merely shrugged again and went back to rummaging around the room. 

That was all the answer Suni was likely to get, so he took the time to examine the room they had ended up in.

It was definitely a room, not a tunnel or pipe like Suni had been traveling on until then. It was also undeniably the room of a fairy, or at least someone who could fly. shelves seemed to tower around them, two stories tall at least, with no obvious ladders. The Imp was proving this as it prowled around the shelves, clambering up them searching for something in lieu of any other way to get up. Who ever had lived there clearly had an eclectic taste or had used the room as a warehouse, piling dozens of things haphazardly on every shelf with no apparent order,all of them decayed into frayed lumps and dusty piles that the Imp scrambled over with no apparent care for the damage it did. 

Though there were the remains of enough technical apparatus that Suni imagined the original owner was some kind of maintenance engineer, what the whole room reminded Suni most of was the Rabbit Hole from Alice in Wonderland, a movie he had watched on repeat as a child. (Dawn found the mad world familiar, while Suni dreamed longingly of a potion that would make him grow big - as big as the towering fairies around him.) 

But now he didn’t want to go down. According to the map the imp had modified, there was an exit here, and given the way the imp was rummaging in the shelves, it must have been up one of the walls. Suni stood and went to help, but had no idea what he was looking for, not how to get up the shelves. It seemed disrespectful to whatever past fairy to simply clamber over their things as the imp was, but there didn’t seem to be much other choice. 

Unless…

Suni blinked, and found himself looking up at a tea-set. A shift to the left, and there was a comfy chair and a lamp, a good twelve feet off the floor. Elsewhere there were other things he remembered from his childhood story. And hadn’t he heard that many of the early fairies had taken their inspiration from stories they had grown up with? Shakespeare, MacDonald, Wu Cheng’en... It had been a way to connect their changed bodies and strange powers to something they understood. Maybe that was why so many fairies now were obsessed with Fairy-Tales. The stories gave structure to the powers that were far outside their biological bodies.

But if that were the case...Suni squinted into the light at the top of the tower. There might be an exit there, which made perfect sense even without the story. And exit at the top, an exit at the bottom. And…

Suni knelt and looked beneath the shelves, blowing aside dust bunnies and cobwebs. The first two curved shelves yielded nothing, but the third revealed a tiny door. It stayed even when Suni glanced over his glasses, showing just how old this place really was. No illusions here, everything was really designed into the structure. But the fairy had apparently not cracked size-changing, and the latch in the handle caused a quite normal sized door to swing open from behind a set of shelves on the other side of the room.

The Imp, who had been nosing around the join in the shelves, yelped and tumbled to the ground chittering excitedly. When it realized that Suni was the one who found the latch it grinned and dashed over to nudge him towards the door. His own white rabbit, leading him through Wonderland.

“The Potion is this way?”

An excited nod and enthusiastic point, then it clambered up to rest on his shoulder.

“And this won’t end up underwater? Or lead me into a cheshire den or some other monster’s mouth?” 

The creature began to shake its head, then paused at the second question and seemed to shrug. Suni paused before ducking through the door. What followed was a minute of Suni asking questions while the Imp mimed its answers and pointed the correct way down the halls.

The halls themselves were completely different from the pipes below, clearly more finished and drilled out with machines rather than grown like the water pipes. Yet the light was still from fungi lamps and the dust gathered in heaps in corners. The rest of the light came from mica reflecting light from the surface down deep into the underground. 

“So, there is a monster through here?” Suni glanced down the next turn nervously.

A paw was thrust into his face that mimed a balance tipping back and forth. Then it pointed down a new hall, one that had higher ceilings and looked more finished. 

“Something that can be a monster?”

The nod this time was enough to flatten his hair down. Gulping, Suni started down the hall. The door had been cut out of the hard tile that it was built from. The whole corridor was built from it, tiny blue emergency lights winking along the floor. It certainly looked more like an abandoned Fairy facility. A powerful one, if the faded ‘Red-A Clearance’ signs were to be believed.

“Oh...kay. I’m gonna trust you on this. Can you get me past the monster?”

A head shake, and a little finger jabbed the center of Suni’s glasses, wiping a dirty smudge across the purple “x" at the end.

“The monster has the potion.” Suni’s voice was dull, but it still echoed down the new corridor. 

He didn't need to feel the nod to confirm his suspicion. There had to be a reason such a facility had been abandoned to the Goblins. Normally Fairies would pull out all tech that could conceivably be dangerous and damage the rest. There was no such destruction here; in fact if he ignored where he'd come from the facility looked akin to the dozens of still-patrolled tunnels he and Dawn had explored as children.

But the signs told a different story. There were hastily scrawled warnings in AR spray paint that his glasses picked up, but the script was so ancient that it had collapsed into gibberish. A mad science experiment could certainly explain all the oddities he observed.

He wasn’t surprised when the imp abandoned him at the round door at the end of the corridor. It clambered down his shoulders, managing to get its foot in Suni’s face twice, then flashed him a double thumbs-up in encouragement before skittering off down the corridor, only stopping to peer back when it reached the door. Suni appreciated everything the creature did, and he didn’t blame it for wanting to avoid any real dangers.

So he squared his shoulders, gulped down his fears, and turned to the glowing blue door, ready as he could be to face what was inside.


	5. The Witch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Deep in the underground of Mars, there is a being that possesses staggering power...and an equal amount of eccentricity. Will Suni be able to convince her to help? And will Marianne survive her first encounter with a Goblin?

Marianne’s reaction time was all that saved her from being captured. 

One moment she was following the roach down the poorly-lit hall, the next moment every light went out with a snap. 

Instinctively she performed a maneuver that would have horrified her father, and had Roland berating her back to the barracks for foolhardiness. She curled and snapped her wings around herself, pulling them in - And in, and in - enclosing herself in a bubble of space nearly identical to the ones holding so many captive above her. 

The same kind of bubble her mother had confined herself to twenty years ago.

But the motion was familiar, performed often enough to be second-nature. For a moment she was in bubble-space, safe from the world and whatever had destroyed the lights, the next she was clinging to the opposite wall, still invisible, having passed through the darkness unhindered, exactly as she had programmed. 

She took a moment to orient herself and strengthen her shields, canceling out far more now than she had with just the roach.

Sound, when it came a moment later, was muffled as if by a pillow, and when -if - light returned it would be seen in faded blues, everything else passing through her.

But for now whoever had cut the lights kept it that way. 

“Are you ready?”

Even muffled the voice sent shivers down her spine. A voice like that hadn't been heard in a hundred years. Fairy voices were sweet, elves low, others melodious. This voice sounded like the crack of stone and sparking fire. Nothing modern sounded like that, and Marianne shrunk away, all the warnings of her youth come back to haunt her.

“As ready as I can be, boss" the second voice quavered, coming from much closer to the floor. It gurgled.

“Then get on with it. We don't have much time before they clear the illusion and find the broken lights.”

That was how she had nearly been caught. The interlopers had put up an illusion of a boring, regular corridor, hiding their presence with mundanity. As for the lights...well, Marianne suspected they had good reason for hiding even from themselves and the thought sent shivers down her spine. How close to capture had she come?

“R-right. Here goes.”

There was a brief flicker from the floor, and a woosh of out-rushing air. Until that point Marianne had not realized just how deep the darkness was; but her secondary senses could not penetrate it, leaving her unable to sense what had come out of the bubble or the location of the two speakers.

The small one coughed.

“Steff? It's me, Theo. Now, don't freak out…”

Marianne expected screams from that, as any sensible person would have done upon waking up in darkness and receiving such a line.

Instead, ‘Steff' growled. “Thang, what did you do?”

Marianne could hear the relief in Theo's voice. 

“Stuff! Listen, for once this ain't my fault. But we don't have much time. So, uh, positives first: we don't have to pay for your operation any more! The bubble fixed that. It fixed my eyes too! Negatives: my hearing is shit and we’ve been turned into frog monsters.”

There was a dull sound of a slap, and suddenly Marianne wasn't so afraid of the mysterious taller voice, because she had been tempted to face-palm as well. This was the exact opposite of every awakening procedure ever performed.

“Thang…” the big one groaned.

“No, seriously, we look awesome. I’m gonna turn the lights back on so you can see!”

“Don't -”

But the boss’ was too late, and the lights snapped on, and Marianne bit back a scream.

She had known they were goblins, had known of the deformities they had surely suffered, but nothing had prepared her to see the creatures before her. All her books, all her stories, all her promises to herself were just high ideals incapable of withstanding the monsters faces.

First, an almost literal frog, boggle-eyes and mottled green skin, wide lips pulled back from the remnants of a human jaw, shrunk tiny so that he was barely bigger than Suni. Wet skin, hairless with mere holes for ears. Teeth jutting randomly from the lips, crooked and discolored, dulled from what surely had originally been sharp enough to cut scars around the things mouth. Naked body, showing the same splotchy green color all the way down its triangular form, balanced precariously on wiry legs and knobby knees above feet that had webbing between the long, prehensile toes. Had Marianne seen a creature like that after awakening, especially if that creature claimed to be her lover, she would have started running and never stopped.

The Awakened creature was little better; same green skin but smooth, no scales or blotches. She was wide, fat little pot-belly over bandy legs and no breasts to speak of. Her original records - presumably lost for good, thanks to the roach, had Marianne not grabbed the file location - gave her birth name as Stephan “Stuff” Periskopabolis, and showed a picture not unlike the form before her, if seen through a haze of AR filters of the type Fairy children invented to mock their teachers. But there was no cruel virtual world at work here, just hideous reality that had warped the poor woman into a stumpy, ugly monster.

But while logic could lead Marianne to pity Stuff and Thang, fighting down the sheer _wrongness_ of their form, nothing could chill the fear that Marianne felt for the final figure. The... _creature_ towered above her, dwarfing the little goblins and looming over even a pure-breed Martian such as herself. There was nothing soft about him - and it was surely a him, despite no external signs. Hardened bits of something, bark or chitten or some combination of the two, lined his form, parodying armor fairy knights wore, but made out of the goblin’s own flesh, scraped and broken in ways that no knight would ever dare unless meaning intentional insult to his king and court. Feet and hands were closer talons, large enough to wrap handily round her waist and with the clear strength to crush heads if he chose. He sneered out at the world, pale face shadowed by heavy brows of cut bark, matched with chipped, yellowed teeth sharpened to points that shrieked as he ground them down while his subjects spoke. He looked like an ancient tree, twisted and diseased, come to life with the express purpose to warp everything Fairy society had tried to create and turn it to rot and decay.

Marianne had to bite down a shiver when the creature’s piercing blue eyes glanced her direction, hooded eyes seeming to look right through all of her shields. He snarled in her direction, hands clenching on the staff in his hand, seeming about to strike out...when a sudden trilling sound came from his hip. Marianne started, nearly losing her grip on the stone, when a flickering red alarm-bug crawled from a pocket on the monster's belt into his hand, its wings giving out a high pitched whine. The bug was so normal, something children still set to guard their playhouses, as to shock her from her fear...even as it shocked the man into action. 

“Cut the chit-chat, Thang. We need to move.”

“Oh! Yessir, Mr. King, sir.” The frog mimed a salute that seemed to be serious, despite the imperfect execution, and grabbed Stuff’s paw without a second thought, despite her three-fingered hand being dwarfed by his webbed grip. “This way, honey. We’d have brought you out closer to home, but we’re going under the crystal field, and even us Goblins worry about that. Oh, yeah, that’s what we’re called, by the way. Goblins.”

And, against all logic, Stuff grinned. “Goblins? Sound’s about right. World ain’t that different now, is it?”

\-------

Suni stood before a round blue door and debated his life decisions. Behind him, the Imp was probably long gone after giving out its dire warning about the monster behind the door. He now had a safe map back to the surface, helpfully annotated by the little creature, and since no one but Roland knew he was down here, there was no shame in simply turning back now. It wasn’t as if he could fall much lower in Roland’s eyes, after all. 

But Dawn would be so happy if her mother returned. The thought of her smile was enough to push Suni forward, seriously examining the door, quashing the fear down as best he could. 

And maybe he couldn’t get in after all. There was no reason that a secure government facility would let an _elf_ in, right? 

He brushed aside the dire warnings flashing over the door lock, both physical paper and dozens of patchy AR explanations that were unfortunately made unreadable by time. It was clear how old this part of the facility was just from the locks; old school biometrics, rather than the simple mind-scanners that fairies now used. Not nearly as secure, either, given how modern locks depended upon one’s individual connection to the net, impossible to fake unless one could replicate the brain down to the smallest neural connection, what fairies called a Soul Lock. Biometrics were paltry in comparison. All this one required was a hand print, pressed onto a blue glass panel beside the round door. 

But Suni only knew the basics of real-world hacking, and the lock stumped him. Back in the castle, there were plenty of places he had needed to break into - housekeepers and butlers being the ones everyone called when locking the metaphorical keys in the car - and most required getting the victim to remember the state of mind they had been in when creating the lock...or simple brute forcing it when the fairies forgot that no matter how ‘locked' the door looked in AR, one could just walk through most screens. This lock - and definitely this door - were far more formidable. 

Still, there was no harm in trying...right?

He placed his hand over the scanner, thinking of all the stories where this actually worked, and prayed that the warnings hadn’t been followed up with traps for anyone trying to open the door.

_“Human Hand-print Verified. Continuing to DNA analysis. Confirmed.”_

The computerized voice read out, and the blue lock flashed green. Suni gulped, drawing his hand back and hoping for the best.

_“Enter the Recovery Room at your leisure, Suni Dai.”_

Before him the door irised open, revealing...nothing. 

Suni blinked, and then blinked again. Through the door was a white-tiled room, just like the corridor behind him, lit with blue lights, but completely empty but for the traces of a blue haze of uncirculated air. Within his glasses was no different, except perhaps the fog being thicker, but that could have been a trick of the light. Not obvious monster, no violent trap, no hoard of mechanical guards ready to eviscerate him…

Slowly, he inched into the room, comforted by the fact that the door didn't close behind him. Even when he was fully inside the room, there was no change beyond the lights brightening slightly.

“ _State your query._ ” The dull feminine voice of the computer continued. 

“Uh…” Still no change. Suni was beginning to get a tad irritated. “I’m looking for a potion?”

“ _It has been 435 da- d-_ d- d-" The voice stuttered, then suddenly screamed - “ **Don’t you even know why I’m in here? Why would you ASK for that?** ”

Suni yelped and clapped his hand over his glasses speakers, causing the glasses to rise up so he saw the blue face screaming at him from the AR smoke.

“AAAAAAH!” He stumbled backwards out of the room.

The face screamed back “AAAAAH!” Then resolved itself into the ghostly form of a woman, pulling herself from the haze. Lights flickered in the room, reflecting a form on the fog, and the virtual woman took shape in the real world as well.

“AAAAAAIIIIIIII - _It has been four hundred days since_...” The woman’s mouth moved from scream to monotone movements completely at odds with her startled then peeved expression. She rolled her eyes above her still moving mouth, and interrupted herself “ _last we_ \- Yes, yes, I know that. Now, who do we have here?”

Her face loomed large, the lights in the mist coming to rest over Suni as she examined him.

“Ah, I see. A Human. No wonder. Bog must not have caught you yet.” 

The form pulled back, and settled into a seating position, floating.

“Well, what do you want, human?”

“Wh- wh- wh-”

She rolled her eyes again, and mimed a continuing motion. “Hurry up, before he comes.”

“What are you?!”

\------------------- 

Marianne didn’t follow the goblins back to their ‘home'. There was no need, really. The fairy military had a good idea of the location of the goblin’s main base, deep in one of the old subterranean cities, through a maze of un-monitored tunnels. While intel on how to navigate those tunnels would be useful, the danger was too great for the heir of all of Mars to go haring off into ‘enemy' territory. Anyways, she had already spend too much time out of contact range. 

So she returned to the surface, deeply unsettled. She hated to admit it, but the goblins had frightened her, badly. It was easy to pretend to sympathy when no one ever saw the creatures anymore, far more difficult with the race of adrenaline in her system telling her that there was something wrong, wrong, Wrong! about the forms before her. 

Genetic fear. The same thing that caused ELFs to jump at snakes and hesitate before entering deep water, no matter what their technological or bubble-gifted powers. Fairies were supposedly beyond them, but Marianne had never encountered anything that was truly a threat to her. 

What kind of warrior was she, then, if her reaction to real danger was to freeze?

And could she really say she was hurrying from the underground because she might need a ‘net connection...or because she was scared of what was behind her? 

She slowed to a slower glide, wondering if perhaps Roland did have a point when he said she was too inexperienced to lead the armies of Mars. And if that was true...perhaps she should not have dismissed the calls for the end to the Goblins so quickly. Some, like Roland, had _fought_ the creatures. They had _experience_. Had she any right to declare their convictions wrong, when she couldn’t even hold true to her ideals when encountering a hint of danger? 

Of course, the moment she exited the underground, Roland himself was there to remind her of that very thing, appearing in her peripherals to berate her for endangering herself and worrying her father and sister.

“Really, Marianne. A whole half-hour, gone! I was on my way over immediately. Imagine what could have happened to you outside my reach!”

“Roland, nothing happened. I just was examining the Repository security system from the tunnels.”

“That’s what we have elves for, dear. _They_ can go into danger, you need to stay on the surface, where people can see your beautiful face. Now, wait right where you are so I can make sure nothing untoward followed you back up.”

As he spoke, Marianne’s fear of the goblins began to wear off, replaced with her typical resigned fury at Roland.

“I am capable of my own security check, Roland.”

“Of course you are buttercup, but why don’t you let me - or one of the technicians - check to make sure.”

“Get out of my systems, Roland.”

“Sweetheart - “ 

“ _Now_ , Roland. That is a direct order from your superior officer.”

Authority only seemed to have any effect on Roland if it was male but approaching the exit of the bubble repository, and a tech hurrying towards her, gave her enough of an excuse to hard eject him from her system. 

She was prepared to harshly chastise the fairy technician for the disarray she had found deep in the catacombs, and then interrogate them on the lax security she had found, but by the time the fairy arrived her curiosity had won out, and once again she put off simply fixing the problem and opted to discover the reasons for it.

“Princess. You disappeared for - “

“Thirty minutes, yes. I was looking at the tunnels.”

A panicked expression flashed across the fairy’s face, replaced just as fast with cool composure and a question - “Did you find anything?”

“No, not anything out of the ordinary.” She said carefully, watching the tech’s reaction just as carefully.

The relief was restricted to the tech's eyes, but was there nonetheless. Marianne added the woman - Diane, according to her file - to the her dossier of people to investigate. Could there be someone feeding goblins new recruits...And if so, was it simply to free more of those bubbled, or for some more nefarious purpose?

“I knew you could take care of yourself down there.” Diane said. “But protocol said…”

“You did the right thing, notifying my security detail.” Marianne said, ignoring the guilty look on the woman's face indicating she had done nothing of the sort - nor should she have to, were it not for Roland's ludicrously tight security on the princesses.

“You had calls while you were on patrol…”

“Roland?” Was he hounding the techs now, too? Marianne wouldn't put it past him.

“No, he says he'll always call you directly.” True, but infuriating, given Marianne’s standard order to route her messages through the security desk while she was on patrol, just like every other guard. But Roland thought he was above such rules, and claimed that there was no point to power unless one took advantage of it -at least, he said so in his diary. “Your father wishes to remind you about the preparations for tomorrow's ball.”

All thoughts of goblins and conspiracies fled her head, and Marianne swore. “He still wants my help?”

\-------

The apparition before Suni blinked, then reused her favorite stock expression - rolling her eyes. On her face it looked creepily similar to that of an emoticon or gif; movements repeated in the exact same way as they had before, without the slightest bit of normal human variation.

“What, no introductions first? Right to the ‘what horrible abomination of science are you’ bit?” 

“S-sorry. I’m Suni Dai, ELF of Mars.” Years of training came to his aid, and he bowed extra deeply, unsure of where this apparition fit into the social order, but not wanting to offer any further insult.

Apparently it worked, for the apparition preened. “Very well. I am The Sugar Plum Fairy.” Suni didn’t even have time to react to that announcement, before she continued with, “ And I am the governing computer system of Mars.”

Suni stared at her, whiplash from two extremely unlikely statements handly freezing his brain.

“Ah, yes, awe. That is the appropriate response. I’m sure your request seems a bit silly now, doesn’t it? Begging the very mind of Mars itself for an audience?” The self-named Sugar Plum Fairy smiled haughtily and sat back into her blue cloud.

“That’s not - “ Suni tried to start a sentence, stopped, and started again. “Mars’s net is not sentient.”

Sugar Plum snorted. “Well, not anymore. Not since they trapped me here 700 years ago. Now no one comes and visits me unless they need to override the system. Which is why you’re here, I assume?” 

“How - “

The form in the mist swirled and suddenly Suni was looking at himself, expression perplexed and saying, in a trembling voice “ _I’m looking for a potion?_ ” 

She returned to her standard blue form. “See? You want a potion. Given the way my Unconscious reacted, you must be wanting a Dissolving code. Or as I like to call it, a ~ _loooove_ ~ potion.”

“How’d you know - “

She rolled her eyes again. “Because that’s all anyone ever uses it for. At least, if someone travels here through the tunnels, sneaks past the Bog’s guards and over-rides the anti-Fay locks. Nothing else but ~ _love_ ~ could motivate one so.” She smiled gleefully. “You humans are ~ _so_ ~ romantic.”

Suni rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, I guess. But it's not just that! It's for a noble cause! I want to wake the Queen. It’ll help all of Mars, and give the ELFs some hope, and bring Light to even the darkest - “

“Blah, blah, no not doing it.”

“What? But - “

“To reiterate - “ The AI split herself in two and the second screamed “Don’t you know why I’m in here?” 

“The Love Potion?” Suni guessed.

“Exactly. I used to have all sorts of friends, and then just because of a little mistake I was trapped here, locked away from all the fairies and with only goblins for company. And your ‘Queen' was the one to blame! But I still did my best to help, giving out my potion-codes to all the friends I had left...and what happens? The Goblin King went and cut all his Goblins off from me too! Now…” She paused, and for the first time a genuine look of regret, rather than a pantomime emotion, crossed her face. “Now only an unmodified human like yourself can visit me. Why should I risk even that for someone like that stupid Queen and her damn rodent? There’s no logical reason for it!”

Privately, Suni thought that there was very little logic at all to the AI. It was clear that she had been locked away because she had gone mad. But that did mean she could be swayed in other ways. Take her name, for example. Apparently the Alice Goblin wasn’t the only one obsessed with stories...

“Okay, okay. I understand why you don’t want to help the Queen, or all the people that put you away.”

“Exactly! If they’re having problems, it's their own fault!” The AI turned her head away and crossed her arms.

“But Dawn wasn’t even born then. And she hasn’t done anything wrong. And I really do love her, but we can never be together, ‘cus I’m an ELF and she’s a fairy…” The AI’s expression twitched, and Suni knew he had her. Circuits and Networks might run on cold logic, but minds ran on emotions. And if Sugar Plum was cut off from her network, it stood to reason her logic circuits were cut off as well. “But if I did something amazing for her, be a hero, save the world, then I’d be worthy, and no one could keep us apart. We’d get our happy ending.”

The AI screwed up her face, her inner conflict conveyed by two arguing mini-plum icons on either side of her. But the battle was quickly won, and she sighed dramatically. “Fine! You get the potion, so you can get the girl.” She stood, and snapped her fingers. “Just wait a moment, and I’ll make it for you.”

Around her the room began to hum, servers hidden behind the walls awoken from a decade of slumber. The mist that the AI floated in churned with the new air-flow, and Plum flickered, her form refracting into little reflections as the lights tried to track the wind, the tricks of perspective used to make her appear three dimensional breaking down as the fog writhed.

“You’re lucky. I’ve been decanting this stuff for years. Mr. All-mighty Bog King forgot to tell me to stop, so the base is po-oh-tent!” A wave of her hand, and a panel opened up from one wall and extruded a flask filled with a glowing blue liquid.

Plum caressed it, wrapping code into the physical liquid, making it shimmer beneath her touch until it became more than just a physical object...or one that only existed in the virtual world. 

“Bubbles are strong - strong as the mind that makes them, impenetrable even from my reach if self-made, and doubly protected by that slave my system became.” She drew close, and appeared to breath on the bottle, her breath coming out as a fog of numbers that seeped into it. “But I’ll just tell myself to look elsewhere for a bit, and the field-dissolving agent will do the rest. But be careful - I haven’t had much to do these last five years but crunch numbers, so the potion should be strong enough for multiple uses. Bring the Queen back if you wish to win the princess’s favor, but do _not_ let it get into the hands of that damnable Imp she keeps as a pet.”

“An Imp?”

The AI glanced up from her work, grimacing. “Yes, an Imp. She sends - well, _sent_ , if she's gone and bubbled herself - it down into the caverns to communicate with the Goblins. And it loves to steal my potions and wreck havoc. Unless you want every ELF it finds un-bubbled, then you’d best keep that potion to yourself.”

So that’s why the Imp knew where Plum was, Suni thought to himself, while nodding in agreement to the AI’s statement. “No imps. Got it.”

“Good. It's done. Instructions are as follows: “ As Plum spoke, her personality leached from her voice, back to the dull monotony of a normal AI. “ _Cover your intended target fully in the field liquid. Wait until the indicator for a full seal appears. Step back. The process should take less than six seconds. Be careful of any_ \- Oh! I nearly forgot!”

The bottle halted on its trip towards Suni, the conveyor that held it jerking it backwards into the fog, almost as if Plum was a physical entity grabbing it back. Her fog swirled around it, and her lights flared as she planted a bright kiss on the bottle. In the physical world, the conveyor then began moving again, but in AR, Plum stretched out her arm to hand it to Suni.

“There! That will get you through any of my pesky security systems. Now _pull_.”

Confused, Suni took the offered bottle and pulled it off of the conveyor and subsequently out of the room. 

Had he been looking through his glasses, he would have seen the gleam in Plum’s eyes and the ways her hands clutched at the device, seen the way her code writhed round the frame, grasping and pulsing with blue light. Instead, he just saw the bottle trailing a few extra cords, which pulled from the wall with Plum’s instructions.

The instant the cord - not the bottle - left the room, every light in the whole facility turned red. Suni nearly dropped the bottle as an alarm began to sound, and from somewhere he heard the sound of pounding feet.

“Damn!” Plum complained in his ear, and he turned to find her mist trapped behind a translucent barrier, pounding ineffectual at it with virtual hands. “I’m still trapped!”

The mist boiled around the point the cable had left the room, the barrier shooting angry red arrows at the breach. Plum slammed her hand against it one last time, then looked out from her cage, where Suni still stood, confused.

“Nevermind, me. Suni! Run! He’ll be coming soon!”

The wrapped cord dropped from the bottle, and Suni followed the AI’s directions. He ran.

\------- 

Moments later, warping in with a swirl of power, and the Bog King arrived, followed shortly by half a dozen goblins running from the security checkpoint, only to find Plum sitting primly from within her fog.

“What did you do, witch?” The huge goblin demanded. 

The AI shrugged. “Someone came to me for help. I gave them what they wanted.”

The King’s eyes narrowed. “And they helped you try to escape?”

Plum at least had the dignity to look a bit guilty. “Well, no. I might have tricked them a bit with that. But he’ll be happy with the result, I’m sure!” 

“Guards! Search the tunnels for the thief!” The king roared. “Don’t let him get away! As for you…”

The fog drew further from the doorway. “What are you going to do? You need me!”

The king sneered. “That I do. So I’m not going to go erasing all your data, much as I’d like to. So instead…” He smiled, red light glinting off of his mismatched teeth. “You are going to tell me everything about this thief, and what you’ve done.”

Plum crossed her arms, attempting to look defiant while still pulling her code as far away from the door as possible. “You can’t make me.”

“Oh, I think I can. Computer, repress the P.L.U.M. executive function.”

“What? No!” From the walls, silver chains snapped out, etched with the words the goblin had just spoken, visualizations of the command lines he’d uttered.

“Playback output log from this device.”

Within the room, the chains bound around the AIs form, dragging her back to the foreground, kicking and silently screaming, but unable to resist. Her voice, when it spoke again, took on the cadence of monotone.

“ _From what time do you_ \- No! You - _wish to view?_ ”

“What time is the PLUM program trying to hide?”

Helplessly Plum watched as a duplicate of her appeared, a perfect replica of the moment Suni had activated her program, sleepy eyes widening in surprise, mouth frozen in the form of a shout, while her own mouth said - 

_“Playback beginning thirty minutes ago.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Authors Note: There are many "spells" that Plum can make. It comes from being the Super Ego of the Martian network: its pretty easy for her to over-run her own systems, or at least the mid-level functions that the Fairies and Elves interact with. (Think of it like drinking a low-calorie shake to trick your body into thinking it got a full meal.) But since she's trapped, someone else must bring the code out of her 'cage'. She can still sense much of what happens in the outside world, but cannot connect to it consciously unless queried by an outside user.
> 
> The ~Love~ Potion is distinctly different that her regular spells, based on a system that the P.L.U.M was originally designed for; using huge super-computers and deep learning to calculate the Fields that Fairies create subconsciously. The computers are so large they are actually stored in Bubble-Space, as is much of the physical infrastructure of the 'net. The Potion is a Field just like Fairy wings are a Field, changing the owners' relation to space-time. Bubbles remove the user (or victim) either partially or completely from space-time. The Potion finds faults in that Field, essentially "popping" the bubble. By 'decanting' Plum means that she's been running the millions of calculations necessary to completely analyze any other field the potion comes in contact with. The stronger the Potion, the less Field is required to find faults and pop the bubble. 
> 
> Suni has no idea what he's been given.


	6. The Plan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So, how _does_ one bring back a sleeping Queen? Roland and Suni don't quite have the same idea...

The worst part of being a princess, in Marianne’s opinion, was the social functions. She had forced herself to attend them with Roland, wearing a pretty smile while he showered her with compliments and showed her off to the crowd, which now she knew was all just a ploy to make it harder for her to break away. Now the press of people, the pressure to perform, the fear of making a fool of herself, all of that was too much to bear. As a child she remembered her mother being radiant on solstice days, perfect in a way that Marianne herself had never been able to replicate, but exhausted the day after. 

As future Queen, Marianne could not avoid every social function, no matter how much they grated on her nerves. But she had found that the more she helped with the preparation, the faster she could excuse herself from the actual function. It helped that Dawn actually enjoyed parties, enjoyed being out in front of the public, and was happy to take most of the social responsibilities of leadership. And that while her sister was in the grips of creative frenzy no one was allowed to bother either of them.

“What do you think, Mari? Pink or Fuschia?” 

Marianne pulled herself from her brooding, to look at the new coat of color on the AR displays. The two Princesses were in one of the cavernous half-rooms on the edge of the palace, half of which was overhung with a cave ceiling complete with stalactite chandeliers, the other half open to the evening air. The real room was shaded in colors of blue and green, reflected from the large fountain in the center of the paved area. Against the soothing natural backdrop, the pink clashed with just about everything and gave Marianne a headache.

“They both look fine, Dawn.” 

“You’re right, neon would be better.”

Left to herself Dawn changed the colors with a wave of her hand, not miffed in the slightest that Marianne was clearly thinking of something else. Marianne’s many talents did not include party planning, and there was nothing wrong with that. If their father simply turned over all such things to Dawn everything would go so much smoother.

This party, for example, would look quite well with green coloring. Virtual bunting unrolled from the ceiling at a wave, matched by the lights glowing from between the stones of the floor. Weaving together the virtual and real, so that one could enjoy both or either one alone, was one of Dawn’s specialties. Marianne spent too much time in the real world to but such effort in.

The younger princess glanced at her sister, worrying at her lip. It was easy to see why Dadga had insisted Marianne help, though. After the Roland fiasco, Marianne had withdrawn, and now the only thing that prevented her from retreating completely into the military was the demands from her father and sister.

With a flick, matching beige tables appeared in the virtual world, to be replaced with real tables later, and Dawn ran a simulation of traffic flow, suddenly surrounding the two of them with hundreds of chattering fairies. Marianne didn’t even flinch, confirming that she was only occasionally glancing in at Dawn’s work. It was a compliment, in some ways, the confidence Marianne had in her younger sister, even as a line formed at the buffet tables and Dawn flushed scarlet at such a faux pas and quickly rewrote the servants’ routes. 

It worried the young princess, and as the world flickered around her, changing faster than a child could upend a doll-house, Dawn wondered what Roland could have done to make her sister withdraw so much. They had known the man all their lives, and he had always been a perfect hero, the knight on the shining white horse from all the story-books. A young Dawn had even been jealous of her sister for apparently catching the knight’s fancy, until she realized that the most powerful woman and the most handsome man were surely made for each other. 

_“Dawn!_ ” Marianne swore, and Dawn realized that she had pulled out the wedding decor on instinct. Pale greens matching Roland’s armor and smoky reds to represent Mars surrounded them, making Marianne’s purple wings stand starkly out of place.

“Sorry! Let me just - “ The colors reverted to blues and teals, and the tables settled back onto the virtual ground, from where they had floated up for the wedding set. Marianne’s wedding had been planned for Spring as well - a spring a full Martain year ago. It had been one of Dawn’s best showings, full of light and color and joy. But now, looking at Marianne amidst the fading finery, Dawn realized just how out of place Marianne would have looked within it. Oh, everything had matched Roland just fine, but Marianne looked like the one spot of darkness in all the light, with her dark hair and darker wings.

“It's fine, Dawn. Just a surprise, that’s all. I really would have looked stupid in this, wouldn’t I?”

The younger sister remained silent, thinking of how much effort Marianne had put into the wedding, though Roland had helped most with decorating and boastful planning. It was probably the last party she had tried to help with at all. 

“You would have looked lovely.” She finally said, pulling back the image and placing a virtual dress over Marianne’s guard uniform.

Her sister laughed. “Look at me, Dawn. All this color and light? I look just like a…” She paused, blinking. “...like a Goblin.”

“Oh, but that’s for the old you!” Dawn quickly insisted. “I redesigned everything for the new you!” 

With a dramatic flourish she brought forth her current pet project, a ball she had mentally set for the fall equinox. The tables flew again, this time colored in deep blue with flickering stars caught in the threads. Around them fairies and elves waltzed, elves wearing winged shoes to bring them to the level of the fairy dancers. Every color of wing surrounded them, but none clashed with the dark, yet warm colors. Firelight flickered off of the walls, and the chandeliers had become stalactites with mellow fireflies giving off their light. The fountain was replaced with a stream running across the whole floor, and the lights beneath them were red and gold while the walls were dark burgundy. 

And Marianne’s dress was slim and form-fitting, not a frothy concoction of nothing, greek inspired with her sword prominently displayed. It matched her wings, with the deep darkness of space dotted with a purple galaxy. It fit over her leggings and boots, and showed off her wings and shoulders without restricting either. 

Marianne looked critically at Dawn’s handiwork, far more detailed than the plans she had constructed for the current party, and the younger princess felt her heart rise in her throat.

“...It's beautiful, Dawn.” And she smiled down at the virtual fabric, running her hand over the piece Dawn had coded each individual star into. And she smiled, a little sadly, true, but it was a smile. “If I ever get married, I’d wear this dress.” 

Her head shot up, and she interrupted before Dawn could squee - “But I’m never getting married, hear? Never! Love is pointless and a lie and … “

Dawn sighed, “Yes, yes. Good only for propagating the species, I’ve heard you say it a million times. But you’re coming to my wedding, right? When I meet my one true love, and he sweeps me off my feet on his giant dragon, and - “

“Alright, no, no, no! Where are those plans? Here! Let's get back to work!” And things went back to normal, at least for a bit.

\---------- 

Suni had been careful to follow the imp’s map to the letter. There were times when he heard voices around him, the sound of running feet and barked orders, but each time it happened there was an opening he could dart into and hide. The bottle in his hands was cool, and the glow of the liquid had died down, dormant until it was used, and so the shine didn’t give him away, even as he crouched, shivering, while ponderous forms moved past. _Surely goblins had trackers, right?_ \- He asked himself, but the flood had left pools and rivulets everywhere, and as he splashed through them his scent was lost. His dark form and worn clothing let him blend into the surroundings, and perhaps the goblins did not know the tunnels as well as they thought they did, for it seemed that in barely any time at all - and only five near-death experiences - Suni found himself in front of a door he recognized.

It was the entrance Roland had shown him to. 

It was a tiny door, deep beneath the Palace, heavily shielded with AR filters but in truth a simple wickerwork thing, twined through with grapevine. Certainly not something capable of holding back the flood waters Suni had experienced, but he had left the deep tunnels three stories below. Here damaged snufflers patrolled, shoved behind the door by kind hearted ELFs who couldn't bear to recycle their inefficient tools. One such creature was even now patrolling by the door, its nose pressed to the floor and mounds of dust piled high outside of the two foot circle its programming trapped it in.

Suni turned away from the mournful sight and jimmied open the door, already thinking of how to tell Dawn about his discovery. Would she be pleased? Would she be angry? Would she have even noticed he had been gone?

\---------- 

Elsewhere, Roland received a notification of Suni’s return, and nearly spat hot tea across his manicurist’s blond curls.

“He survived?!” He swore, shoving the girl away, not bothering to turn off her AR sim. 

He flicked half-dried nails off and paced, rewriting all his plans for the day. He had hoped to be delivering Dawn an obituary in a few hours. Barring any proof of death, he had hoped to insinuate that Suni had run off with the metaphorical silver, though finding anything that the second princess valued enough to mind losing had been more difficult than expected. At the very least, he had hoped to prove Suni’s incompetence while he was gone for a few hours, but the damn ELF had scheduled Dawn’s day so well that the princess hadn’t needed any of his services. And he had done all that preparation beneath Roland’s nose, while listening politely to the supposed plan, a fact that Roland hadn’t even noticed until the boy had been in the sewers for twenty minutes and Roland’s cronies had messaged to say that their plans for disrupting the princess had been foiled by a non-existent ghost. A new dress had been waiting for her the moment the first one ripped, and everyone had admired the amazing detail that had gone into the AR shield that covered her the instant Tony had 'accidentally' tripped over her. The damn ELF had apparently backup protocol for every conceivable accident.

So, at the end of the day, Dawn was still the sweet, kind girl she always was, no more or less impervious to outer influence, and all the political favors Roland had arranged in return for making the ELF disappear would evaporate like so much smoke. The only good thing that could come from it would be berating the boy for his cowardice in not going deeper into the depths.

Roland huffed and told himself to be satisfied with it. Certainly this was not the first setback in his quest to be king, nor would it be the last. He readied his perfect glamor and hurried out to waylay Suni before he reached Dawn.

Behind him, still trapped in her AR dream, his ELF manicurists replayed the motions of painting his nails, drops of shimmering polish dripping from a tightly controlled brush, the girl flinching from a punishing shock each time one hit the floor, though she could no more alter her movements than she could see into reality and understand her mistake.

But this was hardly the first time Roland had left her as such. By now, she accepted it as her due.

\------------------------------- 

“Suni! I thought I told you to get the Potion, not endanger the whole court by haring about the underground!” 

Roland’s voice boomed and Suni flinched, despite not a single other person in the vicinity, ELF or fairy, being able to hear Roland’s directed shout. 

He had been trying to get to the princess’s suit to show her the potion and to make sure her schedule had not been thrown into too much disarray by his absence. Luckily she had been scheduled for festival preparation along with her sister. One of the positives of the elder princess was her straight-forward nature that prevented Dawn from becoming too distracted. Another positive was how everyone stayed away on days that the Crown Princess was forced to plan events. Dawn might be safe from the sudden, inexplicable violent outbursts, but no one else was. Suitors and petitioners alike would stay far away from the two sisters for most of the day, making Suni's job much, much easier.

Still, being halted before he got to show off his prize was a disappointment. Of course Roland would try to steal the glory; nevermind that Suni did all the work, as a Fairy Roland outranked him and could take what he pleased.

But at least Suni would get something from it all. He squared his shoulders and drew himself up to his full, diminutive height.

“I did exactly as you asked, sir.” 

“Nonsense! I asked you to - “ And Roland stopped, eyes falling upon the glowing bottle in Suni’s hands. For the first time in the years upon years Suni had known him, Roland was speechless.

Then he grabbed the ELF by the collar and whisked them into an alcove, well screened from all but the lowest servants.

“Is that…” He began.

“A Bubble Dissolving Potion.” Suni displayed his work proudly, the glow lighting the whole alcove with artificial purple. “Straight from Sugar Plum herself.”

Roland whistled and reached out. “I must admit, you’ve impressed me, Sonny.”

“I’m…”

But then Roland’s hand clasped the bottle, and the world _screamed_.

Gone was the purple glow. Gone were the cheerful sparkles. The whole bottle turned red and a blue head exploded from its contents.

“ **THIEF! THIEF! THIEF!** ” Sugar Plum shouted, and both Suni and Roland clapped their hands over their ears.

“You triggered something!” Roland shouted over the noise, trying to shove the bottle into a side bag.

“I didn’t…”  
 **  
“ROLAND. I KNOW IT’S YOU. GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY POTION!”**

Roland gulped and dropped the potion to the floor. Only then did the alarm shut off. It did not return when Suni cautiously poked then picked up the bottle a minute later.

He looked up to find the Fairy red-faced in a moment of anger, then watched as an AR mask snapped over it. Suni, glancing over his glasses, saw as Roland’s real face contorted as he forced his composure back down until his voice was level enough to speak.

“That _witch_.” Roland finally said when his face was back to a healthy shade.

“I take it you, uh, know her?” 

Roland’s true smile managed to match his illusory one except in the eyes. “She has me confused with someone else. Her memory must have been scrambled when they captured her.”

Suni blinked. “But how did you…”

“Nevermind that.” Roland smoothly interrupted. “Now that you have the potion, we need to plan what to do with it.”

“Give it to the Royal Family, of course. Sugar Plum said it was dangerous, and they’re the only ones who…”

Roland’s eye twitched and he launched himself forward to clap the ELF on the shoulders. “Sonny, Sonny, Sonny. This is why you’re just a servant. You need to think of the bigger picture. You need to plan with this.”

“But…”

“No. You leave this to me. We are going to keep this a secret. We’re bringing back the Heart of Mars, man! No one cares how we do it, as long as it looks good. There needs to be ceremony. There needs to be spectacle.” He grinned and declared. “We’ll bring the Queen back tomorrow, during the King’s speech.”

“What?” Suni sputtered. “No way. We don’t know anything about how the Queen went into the bubble. She could be sick. She could be crazy. She’ll need Awakening technicians. The last thing she needs is to come out in an auditorium full of people.”

“Sonny, this isn’t about the Queen, it’s about making her daughters happy.”

But Suni prattled on, his life as an assistant conjuring up millions of horrible scenarios. “What if she went into the bubble naked? Or with an armed weapon? The royal family sits below the dais; she won’t be able to see them when she comes out, and might assume the worst. Or she could be disoriented and fall. Oh god, we might kill the Queen! And - “

“ _SUNI_.” Roland shouted at him. “I will deal with everything. You just need to get to the bubble during the ceremony. I’ll take the stage and deal with everything else.”

“But…”

“No buts. Just think about your goal, Sonny my man. This time tomorrow Dawn will be yours.”

And, allowing no further argument, Roland swept out of the alcove, plans already whirling in his head, finally, finally his goal within reach.

Behind him, a last but died on Suni’s lips and he tried to do as Roland said and stop worrying. It wasn’t as if he had any choice, anyways. Already an ugly red virus pulsed in the corner of his glasses, certain to release something dire should Suni disobey his orders. Roland wanted him to do something, and he couldn’t really say no.

\------------------------------


	7. Roland and the Virus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are so _many_ reasons to hate Roland. But what, out of all of them, could cause Princess Marianne to risk the political fallout and face him? And is he really _that _bad? (Spoiler: Yes, yes he is.)__

“Suni!” Dawn shouted.

The ELF had finally tracked his mistress to the kitchens, where she and her sister were deciding upon the menu for the festival. Dawn was wearing her favorite blue sundress, and Marianne was wearing a sour expression. They sat before a pristine, white bank of monitors, while beneath them the entire kitchen spread out for acres. 

The whole thing was underground to best service the castle, but natural light was reflected in, making the whole area gleam with a warm, welcoming efficiency. In the distance plots of herbs grew, each a chef’s personal garden, and blue elevators brought the workers directly up to the farms, where they could choose the freshest produce for the royal table. Elsewhere there were darkened rooms, or areas with artificial temperatures and humidity, all in service of making dishes unique to Earth environments. At some stations bubbling concoctions brewed in ancient cast-iron cauldrons while a few rows down ELFs used modern machines to create flavors no Earthling could ever recognize. The whole area hummed with the buzz of invention in equal parts to mastery of age-old classics.

But the princesses were not interested in the bustling spectacle before them. Instead they were focused on the sample plates that the head chef had prepared. Hundreds of thin slips of plastic were set out before them, each printed from the white flavor banks, each recording the flavor of a specific dish as created by the chefs currently working in the Royal kitchens. Other, less easily accessible, computers stored the flavors and recipes of every chef that had ever worked in the palace and more beyond. From all of these the festival courses would be selected, carefully choosing the correct combinations to bring the culinary experience to its very height, no matter the order the dishes were consumed or the background of prospective diners. And, because Dawn was a professional, the flavors would match the theme and colors of the spring festival, and offer something new to every guest. But to do so, she used every tool at her disposal, and she did indeed have a great tool.

Dawn had, at her fingertips, the entire culinary history of Mars.

“You came just in time!” She held out two identical looking tabs. “Which tastes better?”

“Dawn, you know I have retrograde genes…”

“That’s exactly why you are perfect! I wouldn’t want to disgust a dignitary simply because I can’t taste bitter. C’mon! Try it!”

Suni placed the tabs on his tongue, one after the other. “They’re both fine. The second is a bit bitter, but it adds to the flavor, rather than detracts.”

Dawn beamed, while Marianne handed him another tab, stony faced, clearly having been subject to Dawn’s taste-testing for far longer than she could stand. Suni obligingly took it.

The instant he placed it on his tongue he spat it out, swearing. “Marianne!”

The elder princess cracked a smile. “The look on your face!” 

Dawn echoed Suni’s complaint. “Marianne! That was mean! Even I could tell that recipe had PTC in it! It said so in the report!”

Marianne raised her hands in apology, grinning, then ducked from something immaterial. Suni wasn’t surprised when he glanced into his glasses and saw a caricature of Dawn pelting her sister with glowering broccoli. Marianne laughed as she battled off the onslaught with waving hands and an imagined vegetable knife. Even the ELF attendant hid a smile at the two princesses’ antics.

“Mercy!” Marianne finally begged, having been covered head to toe in illusory tomatoes. 

“Only if you apologize to Suni!” 

Suni gulped and caught the thin lipped glare from the attendant. Princesses _did not_ apologize to ELFs. “Dawn that isn't…”

“No, she’s right.” Marianne said, brushing beautifully rendered tomato paste from her face. “ What kind of Queen would I be if I couldn't admit to my faults?” She grinned ruefully. “I'm sorry, Suni. I shouldn't have pranked you.”

“Much better.” Dawn declared, ignoring the look of shock from the ELF chef. Suni knew the ELF must be new to the kitchens, or at least had never met the Princesses. For all the rumors of their eccentricities, it was another thing to see them in action. The idea that a princess - the future Queen - would consider such a lowly ELF like Suni worth apologizing to was rocking the woman's world view. 

“Now where have you been today?” Dawn continued. Suni flushed at the idea that she had noticed his absence. “ I haven't seen you for hours.”

He opened his mouth to reply, thoughtlessly about to answer the truth, when an alarm sounded in his ear and the virus burst open.

Suddenly his vision was red. Gone was the pleasant kitchen, gone was the clean bank of monitors and the busy scramble of activity. Somewhere, behind him, a piercing shriek began coming ever closer while the faces of his friends began to contort, black ichor dripping from their eyes. And on the table...on the table... 

The two princesses (and one confused chef) watched as the color drained from his face. One minute he was the polite, bashful Suni they knew, the next he was shaking, eyes wide and staring into nothing. Tears prickled at the corners of his eyes and his dark face turned an ugly grey. Sweat dampened his shirt and he stood like a stone, eyes not even twitching as he was pulled further into the AR nightmare.

Marianne swore, but Dawn was faster, jerking forward and tearing the glasses from his face.

Only then did he collapse to the floor, gasping. Dawn glanced into the glasses, then dropped them as if they had turned into a sewage-bug, disgust and anger growing on her face in equal measures. She saw enough to know that someone had made the AR nightmare just for Suni.

“Who did this to you?” She demanded, but Suni was mute, tears leaking from his eyes, and all he did was grasp her hand tightly.

Marianne didn’t need to ask, but she grabbed the glasses anyways. With clinical detachment she observed the severed head of one of Suni’s many sisters, the rest of the body ripped apart and leaking blood on the floor. Insects only a ELF would recognize crawled over the table, and she deftly placed her hand over the speakers to silence the high-pitched whine designed to make the whole experience more hellish. 

“ _Roland_.” She hissed, not bothering to play nice as she ripped the virus from Suni’s system. Everything was external for the ELF, so he was not subjected to the searing headache that another would have received had she been so violent. Any damage to the software she caused would grow back quickly: Suni’s system might be external, but it was still the best the royal family had. That was all that saved him from the worst of the subroutines Marianne could see worked into the virus’s code. A normal ELF would have smelled all the scents to go along with observing a family member’s decaying corpse, and the horrific shrieking was only one of a dozen of terrifying sounds meant to make living with the virus hell. 

There were not many who could create such a perfect scenario. Dawn was one of them, but she would never create something so cruel. But Roland...there was a reason he was a high-ranking member of the military. He had a genius for illusions, complete mastery and control of every AR system Mars had to offer. He could cut through ancient Realities with a sweep of the hand in a way that Marianne could barely manage with the King’s sword at her side. His genius was of the kind only seen once in a generation, but it went far beyond that, into the realm of secrets hidden in his diary that Marianne must take to her grave lest she disgrace the whole royal family. Suffice it to say his powers were natural, _purely_ natural, in a way no full Martian could claim. 

And he used his gifts for...this. The virus that pulsed in her hand was pure malice, written with cruelty far beyond what could conceivably be necessary. And while it had been tailor made for Suni, it was easy to see how the illusion could be modified for other ELFs. All one would need was access to their data files and a moment of contact with their personal system. Both were easily accessible to a man with high military clearance. And even without clearance, breaking into an ELF system was child's play in comparison to the hurdles Roland overcame on a daily basis to invade the system of the Heir of Mars.

ELFs had fallen into Madness or committed Suicide for lesser ‘pranks’. The only small blessing was that the file indicated that Suni had been the sole recipient, the one ELF with friends powerful enough to save him. But such a detailed piece of code would have taken months to create, and likely had dozens of test-cases before the final product was unleashed.

And Roland did such things on a regular basis. He went through staff faster than a cheshire through walls, and was praised for the way he could turn servants into automatons within a few short weeks, assuming something ‘unfortunate’ did not happen to them first. Nobles begged him to train their servants, lending him the best and brightest ELFs influence could buy, while lesser fairies eagerly pounced upon any programing he released on the net. 

But this time he had gone too far. He had attacked a member of the royal household, someone irreplaceable and necessary to the functioning of the royal family, and thus the functioning of Mars. Though few would consider it so, the act was treasonous, and against all accepted codes of conduct within the political game.

More importantly, he had attacked her friend, and that would not stand. Without thinking Marianne sent a message - a warning - to her former lover, demanding an audience. She took off a moment later, not waiting for a reply and warping space around her to speed her steps, sheer fury pushing her to visit a place she had never intended to return.

Behind her, Dawn helped Suni to his feet and wrapped him in a completely indecent hug, horrifying the attendant as she was forced to watch a Princess of Mars comfort a lowly nothing of an ELF. Several preconceptions were going to be broken today.

\-----------

Buttercup!” Roland beamed at his (former) fiancee. “What brings you to my humble abode?”

Marianne did not spare a single glance at Roland’s quarters. They were anything but humble, having somehow managed to become even more garish since the last time she’d visited, over a Martin year ago. Memory alone supplied the details as her rage forced her forward into his domain.

Roland was a pig, and his taste reflected it. Other generals kept small quarters near their command’s military barracks and perhaps small bungalows for vacation homes, but Roland demanded a giant suit of of his own near the palace proper, claiming that nothing less was ‘worthy' of him. So his home sprawled across an entire floor of the nearest skyscraper to the castle; one of four that were supposed to be part of the castle defenses but had been transitioned into living quarters for visiting nobles. Marianne suspected that Roland enjoyed looking down on the castle he so coveted, despite the fact that the height was a bare few floors above that of the tallest visible point of the castle, and far below the parts that were hidden from prying eyes. 

The penthouse should have been saved for the shield generators, but what Roland wanted, Roland got. So the whole place was floored with mahogany, imported at enormous cost from Earth, rather than grown to order on Mars. Thick rugs covered parts of the floor, fur taken from animals Roland was proud to brag of killing: Cheshire fur disappearing when one walked on it, a White Ape pelt still flecked with blue blood, the companion beast’s head looking mournfully down upon its mate from one wall, striped fur of half a dozen beasts that Roland had brought back from extinction just to hunt back into oblivion, a leather rug made of the bulls Roland had slain during a short Toreador fad four centuries ago, and of course the proof of his mastery over the animal world with a rearing stuffed dinosaur standing above it's mother's skin.

He thought the proof of his prowess impressed visitors, but it infuriated Marianne. Martians had moved beyond needing to slaughter animals. Meat was grown on animals with renewable muscle mass. Fur coats came from creatures who shed their furred skin like snakes. Even festival monsters had been programmed to only terrify on time-tables. The carnage that carpeted Roland’s home spat in the face of seven centuries of martian science, suggesting an Earth-like obsession with violence. 

The rest of his suit was no better, acting as a testament to the machismo of a world two thousand years dead. In a world with particle accelerators that could create elements of any kind, he gilded his walls in gold and silver, edging mirrors that reflected his, and only his, image back upon visitors. His walls were hung with ancient art, all tasteful female nudes and portraiture of famous Fairy rulers,   
and he peppered his rooms with sculptures by Rodin and Michelangelo and other ancient sculptors, each piece amazing for its cost, if not its fame. Yet he eschewed any art made within the last thousand years, as if his guests might notice his rather plebeian taste if anyone could recognize movements. Nude forms assaulted the eyes, along with Pop Art in garish colors and memorials to violent battles, placed only where they would be noticed, rather than fully appreciated.

It was all...expensive. ‘Look how powerful I am’ it claimed, pointing to dead animals and heavy stone that had to be transported laboriously up a hundred floors - outside of a bubble of course, lest the artistic integrity be ruined - then thrown into the chaos as if sheer quantity would impress rather than any artist merit. 

Marianne was reminded of the one time her sister had visited Roland’s penthouse, as she looked at her former lover standing innocently within the opulent mess of his domain.

It was the only time, over the years of Marianne and Roland’s courtship, that Dawn had ever voiced any doubt about the relationship. She had taken one look at Roland’s rooms, and instantly excused herself for a lie-down. She hadn’t been able to design for a month, plagued by nightmares of the uncultured opulence of the General, and had pleaded with Marianne to allow Dawn to continue to plan the Royal couple’s parties ‘lest Roland influence the culture too severely’.

Neither Dawn nor Marianne had noticed what Suni had, but now, wiser and furious, Marianne did not ignore the servants frozen at attention in every corner, invisible to the lights and mirrors, eyes completely blank and pulse barely twitching as they waited in their private hells for Roland to call upon them. 

“You’ve crossed a _line_ , Roland.”

“Sweetist, I surely can’t imagine what - “

She threw the virus at him, ugly, bloody thing splattering on his personal shields. 

“How _dare_ you! Bother me all you want, but go after Dawn, and her staff? Have you no shame? No honor?”

Roland wiped the code from his shields with an illusory handkerchief. “Come now. That little prank? It was just a joke. If an ELF takes it a bit too seriously, that’s hardly my fault, is it?”

“I saw what you put in there. A regular ELF would be dead, Roland.”

“Well, Sonny isn’t…”

“ _Shut it_.” She snapped at him, and Roland was so surprised that he obeyed. “That was beyond a joke. That was an attack on the Royal House. That is treason, and as Commander of Mars I have been given the authority to deal with it as I see fit.”

For a moment, Roland’s face paled, but it was quickly hidden by his illusions, and he smiled instead, easing forward into her space and forcing her to dodge away from his grasping arms.

“Now, now, Buttercup. You and I both know that anything you do to me will be seen as a bit of silly revenge for that mistake last year....” He was right, of course. Any punishment or censure Marianne enacted against Roland was met with cries of "personal bias" from his allies and accusations that she was overly emotional and unfit to rule. Usually this was enough for Roland to push his way back into Marianne’s life, no matter how serious the aborted punishment, reminding her that she was completely trapped with him and could only delay the inevitable.

But this time she smiled back.

“Right. So I have a more appropriate punishment planned.”

And with a smooth move she drew the sword at her side, and Roland darted away. There was little more powerful weapon on all of Mars than the King’s Sword, Cursebreaker, the one universal key to every system on Mars. And it was especially dangerous to Roland, though he prayed Marianne had not discovered that part of his diary.

But instead of leveling it upon him, Marianne turned it upon his quarters.

“You have attacked one of the Royal staff. As such, the punishment must fit the crime.” She focused, and around the sword reality pulsed and warped, connecting the sword to the overnet computer system. Then, with an easy motion, she swung the sword down.

The blade caught every AR reality in the suit and tore through it like so much paper, erasing the hard work of centuries of coding, revealing the imperfect reality beneath it all. Gilt tarnished, paintings faded, rugs moldered, and the lights flickered and dulled.

But worst of all was the gasps from the servants that lined the walls. Several fainted, and one sunk to his knees, tears streaming from his eyes. 

“You have been judged unworthy of those you oversee. As such, I claim your servants as my own, as is within my power.” And she smiled as she turned upon him. “And that decree will last for two months. Every servant you hire will immediately become part of my house, accorded all the protections of a royal servant, and any further injury visited upon them will extend your punishment another month.” She sheathed the sword in one smooth motion. “I hope you know how to shine your own shoes _Buttercup_ , because Father is expecting you at tomorrow’s ball, and he would be terribly insulted if you appeared in anything less than your best.”

Her wings snapped out, and there was an appreciative sigh from the servants, and Marianne flounced back out the door, followed by every servant but his absolutely most loyal (or brainwashed). There were muffled cheers from the hall after the door slammed behind her, and sobs of thanks.

Roland stared at the door, illusions fading as shock took over, and a small, cronish ELF woman began laughing hysterically at his expression.

"She _got_ you! She finally _got_ you!"

\---------------

“It was my fault.” SunI said later that evening, as he helped Dawn plan her next few days in her private office.

Dawn glanced at her friend, seeing the way Suni curled in on himself, clearly eaten away with guilt. “Really? What did you do, ruin his favorite shirt? Mildly inconvenience him?” She teased lightly. “Perhaps you startled him while he was plotting to get Marianne back?”

The teasing did little good, only making Suni’s face fall further. “No. Nothing like that. I just -” Then he paused, the memory of what happened the last time he nearly told Dawn his plan coming back with full force, no need for a virus after the initial trauma.

“Just what?” And Dawn was in his face, wide blue eyes, slight crease interrupting her pretty brow. Suni would do anything to make that slight shadow disappear.

“It was nothing Dawn, really. Roland just didn’t want me to say something, and he went about it...in the most _Roland_ way possible.”

Dawn searched his eyes, then leaned back. They were floating in her office, missives and plans littered on screens all around them. Dawn settled back into a fluffy cloud composed of love-letters and sighed.

“Roland is a jerk.”

At this Suni snorted, and the tension in Dawn’s face eased a bit more.

“You’ve got that right. But most every other fairy would do the same to me, if they could." He paused, then asked, "Are you sure you don’t want to get another secretary, Dawn? Someone everyone would actually like?”

Dawn sat up, the love letters popping into a flash of virtual confetti. “Suni! Don’t say that! I need you!”

“I mean...I could still do all the work. But wouldn’t you rather have some handsome fairy guy looking after you?” He waved a hand, and summoned half a dozen applications, all from beautiful, if vapid, fairy suitors. With a flick of his mind he turned the files into a bouquet and presented it to Dawn with a gallant flourish. Here in Dawn’s rooms, he could command the net as easily as she did, all because she had set up her personal computers for him in mind. 

“These applications stink!” Dawn complained, and proceeded to pick petals off the virtual flowers. “Look at these, Suni! This one is a bastard - literally, he uses Baron Pestern as a reference. This one failed out of medical school. That one was turned away from a dozen other positions. And if you look into their histories…” The bouquet grew sharp, dripping thorns. “Ugh. They all are just spies and snitches! None of them would actually want to help. They’d stab me in the back the first chance they get, all in service of their actual masters.”

She flung the flowers, trailing torn petals and flies, into a virtual wastebasket. Then she summoned a shimmering crystal.

“But look at this. I’ve got a record of every stupid thing you’ve ever prevented me from doing.” She shook the crystal, and it reflected memories upon the wall of her room. 

“Why would you - “

“To remind me to be smarter. But look! Here’s when you stopped me from throwing Patti Perks off the top of the east tower when we were twelve.” 

Suni flushed, the memory just as clear as the picture, showing a tiny Dawn and a tinier Suni tugging her back by her pigtails, a red-faced childhood bully standing temptingly close to the edge of their 20th floor playground.

“Her wings hadn’t come in yet. She might have gotten hurt.”

“Yeah, but she would have deserved it. She killed Mr. Fluffy!” The memory moved on, to Suni bringing Dawn and the broken toy down to the tool-shop, and the two watching with grim faces as a mechanic performed a very serious operation on the fuzzy machine. The child Dawn had hugged Suni so hard when the toy had come back to life that he had nearly choked.

“And you stopped me from wearing the ‘Liens to my first Summer Ball.” Suni ducked his eyes so he didn’t have to see that memory. The dress in question had been beautiful, a glittering sight to behold, the only problem being the way the fabric turned translucent when viewed from a longer distance away. Not the best dress for a Princess’s sweet sixteen debut. 

“Then just last month you saved the party with those last-minute substitutions. And you made sure the band got the right music for Dad’s birthday. And for Marianne’s coronation…then at the tasting festival...” Memories flickered around them, Suni always at Dawn’s side, preventing her from crying, or getting drunk, or making a fool of herself in a hundred different ways. “See? You’ve always been there for me. All of those jerks like Roland don’t understand. They don’t care enough to see. But you’re always there to make sure I don’t do something stupid.”

She reached out and clasped her friend’s hands. “You know what my dream is, Suni? After falling in love and getting married to a super hunk, of course.” She rolled her eyes at her joke, missing Suni's wince, then her pretty face became serious again. “I want to be there for you, just like you’ve always been for me. Someday, I want to save you, or fix something that you’ve messed up, and make everything better. Just like you've done for me, every day, as long as I can remember.”

For a moment, the alien sincerity in Dawn’s voice surprised Suni into silence, and he found himself lost in her eyes, the temptation to tell her everything rising to the surface. But years of service came to his aid, and he pulled away, knowing how terrible it would be for her reputation if anyone saw a fairy princess speaking like that to an ELF. 

“Maybe I’m being selfish, but I hope I never mess up that bad. I’m not sure I could forgive myself if I did.”

\-------------- 

Deep, deep beneath the fairy kingdom, the King of the Goblins paced. Somewhere, far above, was an ELF with a dissolving potion. He had heard Plum’s story, seen the boy through her eyes, and listened intently to the ELFs logic. 

This ‘Suni' wanted to bring the Queen back.

Queen Juniper had always been a friend to the goblins. Though she had never once succeeded, she had tried to change her people’s opinions on their dark neighbors, and for that the goblins owed her a debt. Few fairies prayed for the Queen's return as fervently as the goblins.

But of all of them, The Bog King knew best the horror the Potion could wright. The pain of being pulled from one's only escape, of being forced into a world that you had rejected to the core, hounded from the one escape the mind allowed.

The goblins owed the Queen too much to allow some innocent fool to ruin her choice. The ELF must be stopped.

And that was before Plum had warned that Roland might be after the potion. The one man who could unite all the monsters of Mars, and he was somehow involved. This had all the signs of a very, very big mess.

And Bog _hated_ cleaning up other people's messes.


	8. A Sleepless Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lets review those plans one last time before the big event.

Suni never got any sleep before large festivals. The Spring Festival was long; beginning on the solstice and stretching a full Martin week, full of speeches, dances and parades among many, many other events. And everything had to be planned ahead for the Royal family, from the words on the AR prompters to the partners they danced with, to the color of their clothing.

Dawn did the planning, Suni made sure everything worked smoothly. And when she retired for a short rest at midnight, he stayed up and worried and prepared for every disaster he could think of. 

Added to his worry was the memory of the virus, ever-present and lurking below the surface, ready to erupt at an inopportune moment. He spent a fitful ten minutes tossing and turning before long he accepted that there was no away he could possibly get any sleep at all. Instead, around 1 am he cleared off a space next to his pallet and sat down on the simple woven mat that covered most of his small room. He breathed deeply, smelling the fresh scent of the grasses and lingering scent of Dawn’s perfume, and tried to meditate the stress away.

Which was exactly when his message alert went off.

It wasn't Dawn’s chime, so he ignored it. Then his glasses sounded again. And again. And then proceeded to chime every ten seconds, at slightly irregular intervals, just to wring the most irritation out of him before he gave up and finally answered.

Somehow he wasn’t surprised when Roland appeared in his glasses the instant he put them on, before even he had opened the messages.

“What do you want?” Rude, yes, but it was late and Suni figured he had a right to be angry, even if no fairy would agree.

“Sonny, you’re not still angry about that little virus, are you?”

The ELFs expression spoke for itself and the ghostly Roland sighed and shook his head.

“Now, you know you have no one but yourself to blame for that.”

“Excuse me? You were the one who - “

“But you nearly told Dawn our plan! If you had just done as I told you, none of this would have happened. You should be apologizing to me. Your stunt cost me half my staff! If you had just done your job, held Dawn’s best interests at heart, and not spoke out, you would be fine now.”

“You made me watch Dawn eat my sister!”

“And none of that would have happened if you had just followed directions.” The ghostly Roland shook his head saddly. “I’m sorry I had to do that to you, but it was for the best. And we’ve all learned something now, right?

Suni opened his mouth to respond, then closed it. There was no point arguing with Roland; he would never see reason. And part of him did believe the Fairy’s words - not about deserving the virus, of course - but about not caring enough about Dawn. He had caused her all kinds of trouble, put off her schedule for a full hour, and caused a political incident between the crown princess and one of her star generals. Things always went bad when he thought more about himself and his wants than Dawn’s. He would be better in the future.

But now he had to deal with both the cause and consequence of his foolish actions. 

“What do you want, Roland?”

“To review the Plan, of course!”

“What ‘plan'? We both need to keep our heads down lest we cause more problems.”

Roland barked a laugh. “See? This is why you need me, Sonny-boy. You see a minor set-back as the end of the world. But that’s all the more reason to keep going! Now. I think we should do the de-bubbling in the middle of tomorrow’s ball…”

“What?! No! That’s a terrible idea! There will be guards crawling all over the place! It would be better if…”

And his mouth got away from him, and Suni outlined what would be a _good_ plan to revive the Queen, while fitting all of Roland’s criteria of being in front of enough of a crowd to prove that it happened, ensuring that the whole Royal family was in attendance, but still allowing him enough room to get to the crystal bubble. The plan took form easily, years of practice coming to his aid, and Roland kept him speaking by feeding him obviously stupid ideas, all the while sitting back and watching with amusement as the eager-to-please ELF played right into his hands. 

“And I’ll keep up an invisibility shield for the both of us, and probably Dawn’s measurements fit her mother, so I’ll have an AR dress ready if she is naked, and the lighting isn’t too hard to control…”

The firelight from Roland’s suit played upon his face, invisible to Suni, and the General let himself smile. Two millennia, and all he needed to finally make his plan work was an idiot too in love to think straight and too stupid to go after the real power. 

Could it get any easier?

\-------------

“Are you sure this is going to work?”

Plum glanced out of her cage, out through her fog, and on to the form of the mighty King of the Dark Forest fretting like a child going to their first ball. She tried not to laugh in his face, but only managed to smother it down to a chuckle. His return glare was worth it.

“You’ll be the most handsome fairy at the ball, sweets.”

Bog gritted his teeth in irritation. “I do not want to stand out. Nor should any of my followers. This is supposed to be _covert_.”

Plum turned back to her metaphorical stitching, her avatar running shimmering computer code through her hands and adding little embellishes with a silver needle and thread. “Oh, you say that. But I know you, Bog. You’ve got a flare for the dramatic a light year wide and yearning for the spotlight.”

“That will be more than satisfied when we drop the disguises and terrify the whole court. Their screams will be all the reward I need.” He grinned menacingly, chipped teeth and cracked smile, shoulder pads raising to make him look even more intimidating, and the watching goblins shivered in fear.

Plum rolled her eyes. She had the luxury to do so; there was little _more_ Bog could do to her. Anyways, needling him was all the fun she got anymore. And it wouldn’t take much to make him irresistible; the code was already there in her head, submitted by a long-ago human hand.

“Come now. Just a little dash of charisma? Don’t you want the girls to swoon before they flee in terror just once?”

He sneered, but Plum caught the twitch in his eye and knew her insults had hit home. Tell a little boy he’s ugly long enough, and it was sure to sink in. Not that Plum herself understood it; she knew through years of research what humans found attractive and what they found repulsive, but without the biology hardwired into her she couldn’t feel as they did. It was just another weapon she could use against the ungrateful little brats.

“Just take my designs and reinforce them, Plum." His fingers twitched in command, and Plum hurried back to work, discarding the tempting code back into the ether. 

“Fine, fine. I’ll make sure everyone with AR Sight sees only the glamour for you and your men. And I’ll make sure my own systems look the other way and don’t alert the authorities. But it won’t work for anyone without the filters. You know that, right?"

“It’s a chance we have to take. There’s no other way to get us into the palace undetected.”

“Uh, boss?” A small, beak-mouthed goblin spoke up, his hand raised as if he was back in an Earth schoolroom.

Bog resisted the urge to groan. “Yes, Fang?”

“Why don’t we just go now? It's dark up top, most of ‘em would be asleep, and it’d be much easier to move.”

That was...actually a good question, and from one of their newer recruits. Bog was almost impressed. 

He turned to Plum. “Why don’t you explain, witch?”

Plum had the audacity to look smug. “Well, I _might_ get a bit overzealous when I’m excited." She tittered, still proud of her work despite the trouble it was causing all of them. "So when I gave the Elf the potion, I made the protections on it rather strong. Now none of my systems can track him, until he hands off the potion to someone else. We only know that the Green Knight is involved because my warning protocols for him override everything else, and broke through my other protections. But other than that, Suni’s undetectable.”

“So we’re going to have to search for him by sight. He’s one of the only ELFs who can see through our glamour; look out for anyone who does a double-take when seeing you. Then match their image to the one I’ve distributed to our darknet.” Bog was lecturing again, going over a plan he had already explained in detail, but it never hurt to reinforce with the sometimes scatterbrained goblins. “Most of you will look like ELFs, so no one will notice you, unless you do something out of the ordinary. _Don’t_ do anything out of the ordinary. If a Fairy is cruel to you, or gives you orders, pretend to follow them and then retreat. If and ELF calls out, do the same. Your goal is to not be noticed until I call for the reveal. If you do spot Suni, notify the ‘net and keep eyes on him until we’re ready for capture.”

The goblins nodded, some with clearer understanding in their eyes than others. For all their odd skills, common sense never seemed to survive the transformation. Brilliant, some of them were, savants at coding or engineering or even using bubble-fields, but less than a third of them would be able to match their socks or point out glaring errors in a plan. Which was why Bog was leader, and why he portioned out the few practical goblins very carefully among the teams going to the surface.

“What are we _not_ doing?” He asked the assembly.

“Being noticed.” Chimed the crowd.

“What _are_ we doing?” He asked.

This time there were smiles. “Finding the Potion!”

And now he smiled back.

“And then?” 

His grin was met with cheers and excited claps from the whole crowd. The first part of the plan was hard; difficult to goblin minds even in its simplicity, but everyone was looking forward to the end, and their glorious revenge.

“Then we wreck their shit!”


	9. Siesta

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one where everything goes wrong at once.

Suni’s plan was good, even Roland had to admit it. Very few would have thought of using the Siesta to enact a plan, but the boy planned his mistress’s day down to the minute, so of course he would never forget the unique Martian tradition.

2,000 years ago, back when Mars was just beginning to be settled and had been turned into an extravagant tourist mecca, the shift from Earth to Martian time had been of deep importance to those doing scheduling. 

The length of a Sol on Mars was almost exactly that of one day Earth, a bare 40 minutes longer. What to do with that time? Hide it in the wee hours of the morning? Never mention it and hope the Earthlings didn’t notice? Miss the marketing potential of it? Of course not! 

And so the Siesta had been born, 40 minutes in the middle of the day when everything - including the clocks - stopped. It was happy hour, break time, and a party all in one. A time for everyone to stop working, pause their sightseeing, put down the microphone, and relax. The one tradition that all Martins still celebrated, Elf, Fairy, and even Goblin alike. 

And, given that the solstice by its very nature occurred during the Siesta, the most important speech of the day, given by the King himself in the Queen’s Hall, happened immediately after the siesta ended. Awakening the Queen during the Siesta perfectly satisfied Roland’s desire for the utmost chaos, while also preventing all of the secondary issues that Suni envisioned.

So now Roland waited, trying not to fidget while he watched his internal clock tick down, as one dignitary or another stood on the podium and droned on about the importance of Martin heritage to a mingling crowd of fairies not paying one iota of attention. They would sit during the King’s speech, act polite and politely clap at all the right points, but everyone was really here to mingle and politic and they would hardly stop that for anyone but the King himself.

Normally, Roland would be out in the crowd, schmoozing and flirting in equal amounts, trying to rally more to his side. But his failure to remove Suni had gained him quite a few enemies, and Marianne had been very firm about him doing his job during the ceremony. More fool her, as his armor always looked perfect and could not be damaged by the loss of a few servants, unlike the rest of his costumes. An AR filter buffed it to a shine, another added a subtle glow that also haloed his hair, and a third tricky bit of coding meant that he was always slightly more in focus than those around him when seen from afar, washing out his companion’s colors and brightening his own. And of course he had his normal charisma enhancers on. 

His AR mask meant that he could yawn if he wanted and he did, frequently, as he was stuck against one wall by both the glares of enemies and his supposed duty. The crowd was barely worth watching, all faces he recognized or hicks starry-eyed from being invited to the capitol and gaping at the cream walls and magnificent lighting of the King’s own hall. And of course Elfs were only as valuable as the canapes they kept bringing him. No, his eyes only followed the most important players, wringing political fodder from the indignity of playing watchdog.

So he waited, planning his triumphant speech and humiliation of that bitch Juniper, and completely missed the horde of goblins right beneath his nose.

\-------------------

Marianne _hated_ parties. She hated the dresses she had to wear, hated the feeling of being dependent on her guards without her armor, hated making useless small talk and pretending to like people who would happily stab her in the back. She hated the press of bodies all around her, hated how everyone played at surprise when they ‘accidentally’ found themselves beside her, and hated the genuine regret others quickly hid when they actually found themselves beside her unintentionally. 

There was nothing but chatter, chatter, chatter all around her and it was suffocating. If her sword hadn't been weighing her down, reminding her of her duty to her father and her people, she would have folded her wings around herself and fled into invisibility. 

She was beginning to feel that desperate as the Siesta bell tolled and the final dignitary - Cedar, the secretary of agriculture and an old family friend when he wasn't boring the world to tears - finished his speech. Worse, the swirl of the crowd was pushing her inexorably closer to the little corner Roland had claimed as his own. 

The condescending smile he sent her was enough to send Marianne searching for anyone mildly interesting to save her. Which is when her eye fell on the most boring, average man she had ever seen standing off in a different alcove, just within reach.

The scowl Roland barely hid was beyond recompense for talking to some random out-of-towner for a few minutes, so Marianne weaved her way right to him.

\------------ 

“You’ve stolen my hiding spot.”

Bog glanced down and found himself looking at the most stunning brown eyes he had ever seen, staring up at him from a wide heart shaped face ringed with tiny purple flowers. There was mischief in her smile and a playful glint in her eyes.

It took a moment for his mind to catch up to his words and he found himself answering on instinct.

“It has the best view of the room, with the least traffic flow.”

“That’s why I like it, Mr. Brown." She had barely paused a half second to look up his alias, her eyelashes flickering as she searched his name from the guest list. The woman was good. 

She paused, waiting for him to belatedly remember his manners.

“I’m happy to share.” 

She darted in beside him, barely a moment to soon, as a brace of chattering court ladies moved towards the refreshment tables, grumbling like old chitter-hens.

The woman peered out from behind him a moment later.

“Are they gone?”

“Bitching about the lack of servants all the way.” He should have bit his tongue, but somehow this woman had disquieted him enough to slip from character.

She rolled her eyes and Bog sighed with relief. She was a tiny thing, barely coming up to his shoulder, though he supposed that was tall for most fairies. He should hate her on instinct, just like all the rest of the over-privileged fluttering fools, but her next words endeared him to her despite his best efforts.

“The one break they’re going to get all day, and those old biddy’s still complain. Just once I’d like to see them do half of what the palace staff does.”

“It’ll be a hot day on Ganymede before that happens.” 

She snorted and lifted her glass to her lips, And Bog relaxed more. Apparently she liked his brusque manner, perhaps expecting it from the poor farmer he was pretending to be. As she sipped her drink, Bog took the chance to examine her further.

Mousy brown hair, coiffed into an impressive mane but melting in the heat of the assembly hall. She had tiny Martin flowers woven into her hair and wore a simple dress of burgundy matching brilliant purple wings that were just as stunning as her eyes. She wore it much better than the court ladies with their far more complex creations, and Bog didn’t need to turn on his AR enhancements to note the quality of the fabric and the subtle weaving that lead it to shimmer even for those without a connection to the ‘net. Attention to detail, even for those who would seem so much lesser to a fairy.

He realized he was staring when she paused to wait for an answer from him, and he hastily replayed his memory of the last few moments.

“The speech? Stuffy, but with more substance than the last three of them. It was odd that he implied he was under-staffed, though.”

The woman stared at him, and he cursed the fact that Plum had forgotten to give them access to the guest list. He likely had just insulted her father, or complemented a dire enemy. Fairy politics was all so confusing.

So he was surprised when she grinned. “An astute observation, Mr. Brown. As minister of agriculture, Dr. Cedar is always exceeding his allocation for new ELFs.”

Bog stiffened. “He goes through them that quickly?”

She shook her head. “Oh no. It’s just that he has a soft spot for his workers, and will do almost anything to bring their families out early. Everyone else thinks he’s mad to remove such a strong motivator, but he says ‘a happy farm is a good farm’ and the quality of his crops seem to prove it.” Then she glanced at him and said, “But I suppose a farmer like yourself would know that.”

The question about his alias brought him back to the task at hand, fooling his woman into not recognizing him as a goblin.

“Ah, I just grow spider-fuel. Our farm’s so small we’ve got ELFs and fairies working side-by-side. And any help is good help.”

A normal fairy would have recoiled in horror at the very idea of a supposed fairy working in the dirt with elfs. But there was no disgust or pity in her eyes when she said, “That sounds...nice right about now.”

He looked around them, at the press of fairies that seemed to be circling like rainbow-colored vultures, hawkish eyes peeled for the least hint of scandal to pounce upon. Everyone was walking in a haze of AR filters that Bog didn’t care to decrypt, but could taste on his wings as nothing but lies and half-truths, just like the words that fell from their mouths.

“My name is Marie, by the way.” 

He started. Had she realized he didn't have AR up? To do so at a party was a serious faux pas; no one was so gauche as to bring up reality in an event such as this one. His disguise flushed scarlet, reflecting his true horror, but she just laughed.

“How did you know?” 

She shot a strange look at him. “You don't recognize me, do you?” He shook his head, instincts beginning to warn him to run, or fight, but she was still looking at him with wide eyes and he resisted long enough for her to say, “It’s...nice. To talk to someone honestly just once.”

“I’m not honest.” He cursed himself for needing to say, as if he wanted to tell this woman the truth, and quickly amended, “Just poor.” 

“Really.” She sounded as if she didn't quite believe him, but then a message came through from Thang, incorrectly identifying the Elf, and Bog was distracted long enough to miss the sudden stiffening of his companion as, just for a moment, she lowered her filters and _saw_ him.

\--------------- 

Marianne had been talking to a goblin. And not just any goblin. No. She had been talking to _the_ goblin. The terrifying one from the tunnels. 

She blinked, quickly, AR flickering on and off as she confirmed her realization. Within even the most basic filters, the man before her was a lean, unassuming fairy in a threadbare suit and a sheepish expression. 

In reality, he was the towering goblin that had hounded her dreams the entire night before, making it impossible to sleep, those chiling blue eyes pairing her down to the soul. 

He hadn’t recognized her. That should have been the first clue. But she had been so caught up in his sweet smile - and so desperate for the illusion of a normal conversation - that she hadn’t noticed. And now she was stuck making small talk with a monster. 

Three things were to her advantage. One, he hadn’t recognized her, which was a boon that could not be ignored. Two, he was distracted, scanning the crowd for something ( _Stupid!_ Marianne told herself, _that’s why he picked this location - he even said so!_ ). Three, while he was still wearing the ugly parody of fairy armor, he did not appear to be carrying any weapons. And she had her sword at her side, ready to draw at any moment.

In other words, she had all of the advantages, and had no reason to fear him - for now. It would be better to keep up the illusion and, as unpalatable as the thought was, continue to engage him long enough to find out why he was here.

But that begged the question. Why was he here? As Marianne watched him observe the room, she saw half a dozen similarly disguised goblins threading through the crowds, most disguised as ELFs or lesser fairies. 

How had they gotten in? Were the guards completely blind? Surely someone checked the guests without filters on. It was hardly rude if the guard did it to ensure everyone’s safety. But no - Roland was in charge. His life was an illusion; why would he ever give anyone the power to see through that? 

And no one had considered it. No one had thought to look past the ever-present AR filters to the reality beneath. Not a single Elf or Fairy even paused as they bumped and dodged around the interlopers in their midsts. Could anyone see the reality?

_Suni could._ A voice reminded her. _Suni can’t see AR without his glasses._ And of course he was here, somewhere. Suni was never far from Dawn…

Marianne searched the room, allowing enough AR into her vision to aid her search. 

He wasn’t there. The impossibility of it was almost as shocking as the goblins; Suni was _always_ there. But he didn’t appear on any map of the palace, on any scan of the audience chamber, she couldn’t even find his location with her messaging program.

“Shit.” 

The word hadn’t come from her mouth. Instead, the goblin had spoken, eyes narrowing and looking upward, far above the crowded floor. She followed his eyes and instantly felt the same emotion.

As the chaos began, as Dawn screamed, as the little form tumbled from the statue and suddenly the hall teemed with goblins, it seemed impossible that Marianne remembered one thing far more clearly than all the rest:

The Goblin turned to her, and said. “I’m sorry for all of this.”

\------------------------------ 

Suni fretted in an antechamber, going over every detail on his plan, while occasionally sneaking a glance into the ballroom below. Dawn was down there, somewhere, and he should be at her side. Nevermind the Siesta, as long as she was working, he should be too, not hiding out and planning something that could ruin her whole day if it went wrong. 

But she would be so happy if her mother came back. That thought alone made him stand straighter and draw his invisibility AR tight around himself. This would make Dawn happy, and he would do anything to make her smile, even if it was a suggestion from Roland.

He carefully checked that no-one could see him before he stepped out onto the platform, high above the room below, swallowing as he stepped out onto clear glass. There were dozens of these clear platforms all around the statue, all put in to make maintenance easier, and he felt terribly exposed as he edged across it and onto the statue itself.

He’d been very careful to clean his shoes, and even then he couldn’t help but murmer an appology for stepping on the Queen’s statue. As he edged across her arm, trying desperately not to look down, a stream of half-appologies tumbled from his mouth.

“I’m sorry it has to be this way.” He started as he placed one foot on the cool marble of the statue’s elbow.

It's just that you’ve left us so long.” He continued as he crouched down, away from sight of even those without AR filters.

“Dawn misses you, y’know?” He said as he carefully edged along the arm, towards the statue’s wrist.

“Marianne and the King, too" He added, reaching back to check that the Potion was still secure on his back. It was strange that no alarms had gone off yet; he could have sworn there had been something protecting the Queen’s Bubble from anyone getting too close. Maybe it only prevented people with wings from approaching; the designers probably had thought no-one was so foolish as to _climb_ to the bubble.

“I don’t know why you left. And I don’t know why you haven’t come back yet.” He said as he reached the lower wrist and carefully stood up, partially hidden by the thumb. “But we could all use your guidance. Things have gotten so much worse since you left.”

There was a pannel before the huge crystal bubble, invisible from below, but easy to opperate by someone with Suni’s clerances. Quickly he threw up a sound-dampener and an illusion that would show the crystal still shut. A few quick taps,and and the cryastal ball began to open, flower-like, releasing air twenty years old, the stagnant smell completely at odds with the pearly bubble that floated within. 

He reached back to uncork the potion, eyes stunned by the beautiful shimmer of the Queen’s Bubble. It danced in the warm light of the chamber, twisting lightly in the current of air that held it fast within the crystal. Suni had always assumed that the glowing crystal was a trick of design, of hidden lights or subtle reflections, but no - the Queen’s bubble really did glow, pulsing with a warmth that echoed its moniker; The Heart of Mars.

He stood, entranced just long enough for Roland below to notice his hesitance and begin coding an incentive, when, quite suddenly, the entire plan fell apart.

“Suni! What are you doing up here?!”

Suni turned so fast he nearly lost his balance, only prevented from a fall by Dawn’s out-streatched hands.

The second princess was floating next to him, blue wings out stretched but AR filters hiding her just as deftly from the crowds below as Suni’s own cloak. After all, she had coded both of them. 

“I’ve been looking for you everywhere!” She continued. “You’re not showing up on the Palace scanner,The and I was worried.”

Below, Roland’s face contorted in anger, even as Suni asked, “How did you find me?”

Dawn laughed, apparently not caring in the least that her friend was two hundred feet off the floor in a restricted area. “Silly! I looked! Now, I need your help with all these new guests.”

Suni blinked. “...new guests?”

“Of course! See?” She pointed, and after steeling himself for the height, Suni followed her finger. Over his glasses he saw...goblins. Lots of them, all milling around the ballroom clearly looking for something.

He swore and ducked back into the shadow of the statue. A moment later he tugged Dawn after him, realizing that she had no idea how dangerous the situation was.

A fact she proved when she turned to him, beaming and said, “Isn’t this exciting? Finally, goblins coming to one of my parties!”

“They’re not here for you, Dawn.” Suni said, back shoved against the statue and beginning to shake. “They’re here for me.”

But she wasn’t listening. “Don’t be silly, Suni. When have you ever done anything that would draw attention? No, they’ve finally answered my invitations! 

Maybe she was right. No one had ever cared about Suni before, why should they start now? Anyways, the plan was bust, and even Roland couldn’t blame him for backing off when Dawn called. So Suni carefully stood and walked back to Dawn.

“Alright. I’ll help you sort this out. Just - “

But whatever he was about to say died on his lips, as below Roland’s fingers twitched, and Dawn’s pretty face exploded into blood and viscera and Suni, _knowing_ it was a trick, still flinched away as all his nightmares came true in one horrid instant, and he tumbled, backwards, off the statue.

\--------------

“SUNI!” Dawn fought her way out of her own nightmare into a worse reality than any Roland could dream up. 

Suni, her best friend, her lifelong companion, was tumbling away from her, scream on his lips and terror in his eyes, and she acted on instinct alone.

The invisibility filter snapped off, and she dove, a blast of sound coming from her wings as she warped gravity around her to go faster, faster, diving after her tumbling friend. 

A second later, unseen and unnoticed, Roland appeared where she had stood, and with a carefully booted foot, kicked the potion bottle off the ledge after them, another plan smoothly coming to take the place of the old, and he grinned at the chaos about to unravel.

But Dawn didn’t notice. Just like she didn’t notice a shout and half a hundred goblins unmasking themselves in the crowd. No. Her world focused down to a single point and her wings screamed at the speed she demanded from them.

The three seconds between Suni’s tumble and the moment Dawn caught him were etched in her mind for ever, horrifying clarity and terror wrapped into a single moment, only surpassed by that shock when she flared her wings and reversed gravity in one motion, the strain of the action enough to nearly rip the delicate fields of her wings and cause her to stumble when, half a moment later, they landed safely on the dais, the center of attention of the entire room.

Which is when, pulled ever downward by the full gravity of mars, the potion fell upon Dawn’s beautiful blue wings.

\------------- 

Marianne was already in motion, before Dawn screamed. She had seen the goblins, seen Suni fall, seen Roland disappear. 

All around her guards were drawing weapons, civilians were shouting, and chaos was rippling through the room.

She didn't care.

The moment her sister screamed, everything else faded away, and she was at Dawn’s side in and instant, warping reality itself to suit her needs.

Only to find Suni holding Dawn as she screamed again, a viscous purple liquid eating holes through her wings. Seconds passed and the holes grew wider and wider, consuming the fragile field membrane, and Marianne wasted precious moments watching in horror.

Then there was a flash, and the goblin, _her_ goblin, was at Dawn’s side, a dagger in his hand. Other goblins tackled Marianne and Suni, but he ignored them both, simply _reaching into_ Dawn’s wings and cutting out the poison. There was an acrid stench in the air, and Marianne had to watch as Dawn’s beautiful wings were slashed mercilessly, while the goblin’s own hands burned as he caught every drop of the liquid and discarded it on the ground.

And all through it, Dawn didn’t stop screaming, even as the goblin’s butchery seemed to work, and the holes stopped spreading. Marianne knew why. A fairy’s wings were an extension of their mind, any damage was akin to having iron bored into one’s soul. And now a third of her sister’s wings were gone, and Marianne couldn't imagine the pain she was feeling.

“Get them!” Somewhere a male voice screamed, and the goblin dropped the dagger as he was hit from behind by a guard's arrow.

“Retreat!” The goblin shouted out, and suddenly the goblins in the crowd were disappearing, pulling invisibility around them or sinking into tunnels as the ground buckled beneath the throne room. Now Marianne was fighting hard to escape her hold, but not fast enough, as the goblin gathered up her still-screaming sister.

He turned to her, even as he faded away. “Return the potion. I will return the girl.”

And then the lights cut out, just like in the corridor a bare two days ago, and they were gone.


	10. Reaction

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> King Dadga of Mars comforts his subjects, and Bog quickly comes to regret his hasty actions.

Bog was already regretting his decision. Never mind that goblins were the only ones who could help the potion-scared girl, taking one of their own was tantamount to declaring war on the whole of the fairy kingdom. A pretty girl like her was sure to have friends, there were probably dozens of suitors already tracking them, ready to take Bog’s head.

But that wasn't really what was bothering him.

It's just that she wouldn't. stop. screaming.

For such a little thing, she had a hell of a voice. Her scream echoed down the tunnels, which in normal circumstances would have lead pursuers straight to them. Here, her howling would do nothing but confuse them more, as the tunnels took her shouts and ricocheted them into a hundred conflicting echoes, some being picked up and modified by ancient filters and turned into screeching laughter, or chilling music, or set to mad, broken scenarios. Any fairy trying to follow by sound alone would become hopelessly lost, and likely perish with no need of any goblin intervention.

Which didn't solve the problem of the girl screaming directly in his ear. 

He was tempted, damn tempted, to just throw her in a bubble and be done with it. But of course that would only worsen the damage, especially if she struggled to free herself. 

So instead he took the fastest route to the underground, moving on long years of instinct while other goblins confused the trail as they all took separate routes back home. A few might be caught, though Bog doubted it; while perhaps not practical his raiding party were all experienced and could navigate the tunnels better than any fairy alive. They didn't need maps, and knew better than to trust their eyes. Most had dropped whatever AR they had the instant they hit the tunnels, knowing that any map could be altered by illusions or made obsolete the instant a flush came. The only ones who might do otherwise were masters of illusion in their own right, and their job would be to send up further illusions in the goblins’ wake, hacking into existent filters and adding further confusion. Bog nodded to one who was already in position, but the rat-like goblin didn’t see him, already falling into a code-trance as the nodule he hid in closed up behind him, and his team scattered back into the background, knowing he was safer there than in any bubble. The fairies would never think to look for goblins in the walls, though they had designed the system themselves, the nodules once controlling the water works, before everything went AR. If any fairy remembered their existence, they certainly wouldn't think anyone would lower themselves to using the sticky, half-organic controls.

All this was according to the plan, though Bog doubted many of his staff remembered it now. Most were probably just heading for _home_ with every instinct they had. That was the challenge of leading goblins; one had to assume that the instant anything went wrong they would fall back to habits. Build that into the plan, and no matter what went wrong one could assume goblins would react perfectly; forget it, and you would get those under your command killed. Many leaders before Bog had made that fatal mistake, but Bog himself knew better. 

He dodged down tunnels, following his own homing instinct, occasionally seeing other goblins scurrying down side passages, all following their own unique instincts to their own burrows spread all across the underground. Bog had been sensible enough to pull from a wide range for the raid group, anticipating that no matter what happened, it would end with angry fairies and fleeing goblins. Having them spread chaotically across all of Mars was both good sense and cause further confusion.

Of course, the screaming fairy girl needed help that only could be provided by Bog’s own doctors, all the way in the goblin capitol, half a planet away. And she needed it fast. So even as his instincts served up a solution, leading him down the correct tunnels, his mind raced to catch up, debating on the dozens of different ways to cross the distance, only to skid to a stop before the answer.

“I thought you didn’t like the bounce tubes, boss. ” Fang’s path took him parallel to Bog’s, his home was just a twenty minute dash down a core tunnel that branched off from the once massive underground station. 

“I don’t.” Bog said as he loaded the girl into the silver, tapered capsule. “But the sooner she stops screaming, the sooner I will stop wanting to murder everyone I meet.”

Fang gulped at the expression on his leader’s face. Bog wasn’t kidding; his normal scowl had turned into a full grimace, and his brows knotted in a way that usually preceded someone losing their position, if not a limb. The little goblin hurried to the controls, eager to get the boss to his destination as fast as possible even as Bog strapped into the bubble-controls within the vehicles. 

Bog winched in his wings as tight as they could go, completely covering the now thankfully whimpering girl, and braced himself for the acceleration.

Fang wished his master luck, and pressed the firing mechanism.

\----------------- 

Mars was a tiny planet, compared to Earth. ⅓ of the size, it should have been easy to traverse, even with ancient 21st century technology.

Unfortunately, the crystals that had destroyed Earth had also come for Mars, preventing all mechanical technology from working any where near the crystal field. Most Fairies and ELFs lived far from the Crystal, on the total opposite side of the planet; but in the beginning there was always someone who would lose the lottery and be sent to work fields closer to the crystal. And if one didn’t want to walk for the rest of the trip after hitting the field, a non-mechanical solution had to be found.

Thus the bounce-tubes were born; a simple bubble-propelled machine which turned a magnetic car into a rocket that could travel about the speed of a pre-fall Earth fighter-plane. They were terribly dangerous, navigation being next to impossible while rocketing down a tiny tunnel relying on sense alone, notorious for crashing under the hands of inexperienced drivers, and were quickly discontinued as the population of Mars fell ever lower. Now no one remembered how they worked and the goblins used them as sparingly as possible, reserved for emergency situations.

But there was some privilege to being King, and Bog concentrated on that as the wailing from the backseat started up again just as the acceleration hit, momentarily throwing the sound of the scream behind them. Not that that lasted. Frustration went to fuel his focus on the only piece of software in the whole car; a tiny but highly specialized bubble that connected the tunnel switches to the mind that flew on the car and required a tricky bit of fielding to make work.

The girl screamed louder at the first turn, but Bog suspected she had no idea how near they had come to slamming into a wall; instead the switch altered the tunnel at the last second, magnetic walls conforming to his command and sending them rocketing in another direction, away from one goblin town and onto another. Further turns followed, each keyed by Bog’s mind so as to keep them moving as fast as possible. With no motor on the vehicle itself, every bit of speed was needed for a full trip across the planet. 

The trip would take a bare fifteen minutes, but Bog was already close to giving up and leaving the girl to fend for herself; at least long enough to learn that screaming brought all the nasties out in the underground.

\------------------

Marianne was furious. Had the lights come back on immediately, there would have been blood on the tile, most likely Roland’s. She didn't know how he was to blame, but she was certain he was. Everything truly bad in her life (rather than just mildly irritating, like parties) could generally be blamed on Roland, and this had all his hallmarks : massive chaos, unnecessary violence, and a chance to make himself look a hero.

But the goblins had managed to sufficiently damage the lights so that it took a full seven minutes till they returned, and as King Dadga spoke soothingly to his subjects, begging them to remain where they were, Marianne sat an fumed. Only Roland’s soldiers were allowed to move, tracking down the goblins the instant their minds cleared enough to use their extra senses to navigate.

Of course, Marianne would have been after her sister the moment the goblins let her up, feeling for her sonar-sense and pulling up her infrared fields, but no, the Royal family had to be safe, and be seen as such, as per a silent request from her father, so she waited, feeling Dawn get further away every second.

When the lights came on, she had moved past furry into silent, consuming _rage_. She could already tell that Roland's orders to her soldiers were ineffectual, perhaps intentionally so, and resulted in not a single goblin hostage taken in retaliation. In the meantime, the other generals were slow to respond, and Roland had locked her out of command by simple expedience of taking control before she could issue orders. Damn him.

Roland, fool that he was, saw her white face and stoic expression, and assumed that he was safe, and had nearly reached the podium when Dagda spoke out.

“My Dear Subjects, I can tell you are frightened. I am as well.” His voice was warm, kind, and somehow heard as if he was speaking to each Fairy and Elf individually, rather than addressing the terrified as a crowd. “However, I see now that none of you have been hurt unduly. Please, return to your homes and your festivities. The Palace can deal with this crisis, but there is no need for us to abandon our traditions for this…” for a second his benevolent smile wavered, and Marianne felt ashamed of her reaction: despite the chaos, Dadga immediately had taken the time to comfort his subjects, even when he must be as worried as she was. “...this unfortunate upset.”

He continued, his voice ringing with more authority now, as the civilians began hurrying out, surely just as comforted by his apparent control of the situation. “Now, rouse the generals and gather the council. We must find the reason for this callous attack, and find my daughter as quickly as possible. We will reconven in five minutes in the upper chamber: have your staff ready to move by then.”

He snapped his wings out, the flare of green light they emitted his traditional end to his speeches. But this time he did not wait for applause or answer any shouted questions, he merely flew upward, Marianne joining him a moment later. For a moment their wing beats were the only sound in the hall, then work erupted around them, as every courtier flew to their station and everyone else returned home. 

It surely looked marvelous from below, the King and Crown Princess taking flight at once, serious expressions on their faces and stately wings never wavering as they flew towards the King’s chambers.

The reality was less impressive, as Dadga landed on his balcony, panting from exertion and needing to lean upon a column to regain his breath. Maintaining one’s wings was hard during times of stress and mental turmoil, and that alone showed Marianne the struggle her father was undergoing.

“Father…”

He waved her away. “Its alright, Mari. Just let me regain my composure.” He pulled a green handkerchief from a pocket and mopped his brow. “My poor Dawn…”

She clasped his shoulder. “I don’t think they’ll do anything to hurt her, Father.” He looked surprised, and she was about to continue when Roland landed upon the balcony, Suni beneath one arm.

“I have captured the culprit!”


	11. The Council

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A princess gone and a kingdom in danger! Quick, to the council chambers!

For the first time in his life, Suni was at the center of attention. In any other circumstance, he might have marveled at it, all the heads of Mars, staring at him. Instead, he curled in upon himself and had to be kept before the assembly by Roland’s punishing grip.

“The _Elf_?” One General exclaimed. “How could an Elf cause all this?!” 

But there were already murmurs and quickly hid glee from others, whispers starting _“of course he’d betray her, he’s an_ ELF _.”_ and _“They can’t be trusted with anything, you know.”_ And Suni sank further into despair. Roland had found him sobbing, holding Dawn’s torn train, and it seemed nothing could pull him from his anguish, even all the threats Roland could invent...and he was very inventive. 

“He stole a Dissolving Potion from the goblin kingdom.” Roland said, shoving Suni further forward. “They probably wanted it back.”

“I didn’t steal it.” Suni whispered. “She - “

“He should be executed for Treason!” One of Roland’s cronies, a weapon designer, shouted, likely at Roland’s silent behest.

“Be quiet, Mayford.” Dagda snapped, his tone harsh enough that the fairy’s mouth dropped open, having never heard the King speak a single bitter word. More surprising was the fact that the King knelt next to Suni, placing a calming hand on his shoulder.

“Sir, this Elf - “ Roland began, only to be silenced by a glare that could freeze Venus. 

“Roland, Mayford, right now I do not care what laws this boy has broken. I just want my daughter back, and he is the only one that can tell us why this happened.”

Roland recovered his words. “Surely that is obvious, the goblins…”

“I would _Shut Up_ right now, Roland, if you knew what was good for you.”

The knight glanced at Marianne, and saw the white-tipped rage boiling just below the surface of her expression, and wisely stepped back.

“Tell us what happened, Suni.” Dagda said.

“He said....He said that bringing the Queen back would make everyone happy.” Suni sobbed, hands still clutching the lace train. “That it would make Dawn happy.”

Marianne’s brows twitched and she leaned forward, eyes locked on Roland. “ _Who_ said that, Suni?”

But the Elf had already moved on. “So I went through the tunnels and met Plum and she gave me a potion that would bring back the Queen.”

There was a sudden murmur from the councilors in charge of the various infrastructure of Mars. Cedar and Lazier exchanged worried glances, and Pennyworth, the woman in charge of interfacing with the Martian computer system, swore out-loud.

Dagda prompted further. “You spoke to Plum? The Sugar Plum Fairy? How did you find her?”

Suni gave a little broken laugh. “It was such a stupid name, I had to remember it. An Imp gave me directions, showed me through the maze and kept me safe. But Plum said not to trust it…”

“Juniper’s Imp has resurfaced?” Now Hazel, the director of the bubble repository, looked worried. “It disappeared years ago…”

But Dagda paid no attention, instead asking Suni, “Why did she give you the potion? Its locked from all Fairy hands…”

Another one of those sad laughs. “I’m not a Fairy. And she’s crazy. She wouldn’t give it to me to save Mars, or to bring back the Queen, or any of that. She called it her Love Potion - she thought that if I did it for Dawn, then it would be okay. But it’s not...it’s not okay. Dawn...she got hurt. I didn’t know. No one said…” He dissolved back into sobs, and Dagda turned away. 

“Well, now we know how he got the potion.” Hazel said, rubbing her brow. “To think, all it would take was an elf asking for it…”

“And a suitable sob story.” Mayford grumbled. “My father _told_ you people that she needed to be dealt with.” 

Pennyworth snapped, “Don’t speak out of your field, boy. Doing that could unravel all of Mars!”

“Right. So instead we trapped her like a Djiinn in a bottle, ready to be opened by any Elf or Goblin that happened by her!”

“I have reports that only the Royal Family of goblins can access her, though.” Stewart, the adviser in charge of the underground and thus the goblins, said. “Even they recognize its danger.” 

“What danger?” Breem, one of the newest councilors, asked. “What is this potion? Why have I never heard of it?” 

Dadga sighed and sat back. “We’ve tried hard to suppress all knowledge of it, over the last seven hundred years. Back when Plum went mad...but now people have forgotten all about her as well.” He turned to one of Pennyworth’s assistants. “Why don’t you explain, Karim?”

The AR master nodded, and a graphic flickered into being above the table they were all sitting round. Marianne couldn’t help but notice that everyone instantly saw it, indicating that even after the disaster everyone still had AR up. It was very possible that no one but her knew how the goblins had infiltrated the party.

“You know how black bubbles are made.” The device, a simple box that every fairy child on Mars knew how to make, appeared on the filter. “They are the second easiest fields to create, and were used to store and transport the population of Earth here to Mars, among many other things. Black bubbles can be ‘popped’, releasing their contents, by devices housed in Hazel’s facility, and various other places around the planet. They are child’s play to use, though difficult to create.”

Then the graphic changed, to a three-dimensional anatomical portrait of a Fairy, focusing upon the wings.

“Advanced fields, such as those constructed by a Fairy’s mind, are far more complex and can be unique to the individual. Through the generations, our minds have gifted us with a host of meta-natural abilities, most visible of which are our ‘wings’; physical manifestations of the fields we control. Every one of us in this room can easily produce white energy bubbles, but most everyone can also control gravity, connect mentally to the bubble-dimension where our computers are stored, and, most importantly for this discussion, create personalized bubbles merely by the use of one’s wings.”

The graphic showed the fairy closing their wings about themselves and shrinking, going into the fetal position as their heart-rate slowed and their eyes closed.

“Essentially, every Fairy can create their own storage bubbles, and put anything in them, even themselves. In the latter case, since one’s mind is connected to the higher dimension - the same in which we keep our computers - while in the bubble, it’s common to attach an ‘awakening’ clause to such a bubble. When those conditions are met, the Fairy inside the bubble will release it and emerge unchanged back into our world.”

A computer, indicated by an organic squiggle of lines, appeared on the graphic and sent a pulse to the fairy, who drew back their wings and stood again.

“But there are those who might want to Awaken someone before their time. Whether and Elf without access to a de-bubbler or a Fairy trying to Awaken a loved one, there have been many throughout our history who have wanted a worst-case scenario override.”

“The PLUM program eventually developed just such an override, through much experimentation and hardship. I won’t bore you with the details, but the technique undoes the fields themselves, altering the dimensions around them until they find the unique frequency of an individual’s field and creating an oppositional one - a ‘null’ field, if you will.”

“Such a field can nullify any field it encounters, only hampered by the quantity of initial liquid produced. That means any black bubble can be popped, any energy-bubble undone, any field at all destabilized.”

A voice spoke out, and it was Suni of all people, hands still bunched and eyes red. “But...that doesn’t explain what happened to Dawn. When the potion hit her wings, it ate right through them. And it hurt her…”

Karim nodded. “But of course. A fairy’s wings are a field. A field that only that specific fairy mind can create, but a field nonetheless. And that is why the dissolving potion is so dangerous: it eats away at any field it encounters. And since personal stasis bubbles are created by one’s wings...to open one, you must destroy the wings of the fairy inside.”

Around the table were shudders, even from those who already knew the tale. But Suni’s eyes went round, and he turned in horror, looking straight at Roland, about to speak, when the knight surged forward and slammed a hand on the table.

“Right. That’s enough of repeating the same thing everyone knows. None of that explains why a bunch of dirty goblins want to get their hands on our potion.” 

Mayford agreed, “Right. You’d think they would want Juniper back, given how much they loved her.” 

Karim considered, but Hazel spoke. “They probably need it to de-bubble more goblins. They’re infertile, and probably don’t have the intelligence to make their own machines…”

“That would explain why their King himself came.” Stewart said. 

Marianne blinked. “Their King?" 

“Yes. The Goblin who took Dawn; the one with that dreadful armor. He matches descriptions of their leader.”

“Ah, If only I’d been at your side, my love! I would have been able to save you both!” Roland said, but Marianne was caught in the thought that that... _creature_ was the leader of the goblins. He certainly had the bearing of a King, from what she remembered of him back in the Bubble Repository. But he had been so meek while in character, and so clearly uncomfortable in the large crowd beneath his disguise. He certainly hadn’t seemed as stupid or thoughtless as everyone described the goblins. In fact...

“He knew how to handle the potion.” She said, and all eyes turned to her. “When no one else moved to help Dawn, he did. That she had wings at all left were because of his quick action.”

“That’s preposterous. I saw the knife!" Another councilor cried. “I’ll never be able to forget that monster standing over our beloved princess!”

“Yeah, he cut her wings. But that stopped the potion from eating more of them. And he was burned in the process. I was _there_.”

They didn’t see her point, didn’t understand what she was trying to say, but her father did, instantly. And as Roland was about to interject something about her being hysterical, Dadga said,

“My daughter has a good point. If Bog acted to help Dawn, to prevent her from being further injured, then it is unlikely that they will hurt her back in the goblin kingdom.”

Marianne slotted away the name - _Bog_ \- into her mind, wondering a bit at the familiarity her father spoke with. Had he met the Goblin King before? Why would he know his name so quickly? Or was he merely reading Stewart’s reports as fast as the adviser could sent them?

“I don't think he knew who she was, either.” Marianne added, and the councilors reacted with incredulity. Quickly she spoke over them. “I saw him before the disaster, and he didn’t recognize me at all. I don’t think the goblins had access to the guest list, or AR recognition. And if that’s the case, they might not know who Dawn is. They probably only took her to get leverage, without knowing who they captured. That could be to our advantage.”

“Please, Buttercup, leave the tactics to the professionals.” Roland said, and Marianne ground her teeth. “It doesn’t matter if they know they’ve captured a princess or not. We need to rescue her now, before something terrible happens to her. I’ll take the army, and march to their capitol. We’ll take her back by force, and prevent any further attacks like this!”

“You can’t be - “

But the other councilors were nodding along, even Hazel and Stewart, as if Roland’s solution was obvious.

“You can’t negotiate with these monsters.”  
“What if they get into their heads that they could do this again, any time they wanted something?”  
“If they think our defenses are weak, their disrespect will become more brazen.”  
“This is an act of rebellion. We must respond with appropriate force.”  
"We certainly can’t let something so powerful fall into the hands of simpletons!”

“Surely finding the potion would be easier?” A single voice, Cedar’s, said.

“I’m not sure if it’ll be that easy." Suni gulped as the council looked at him again. “Dawn said something, that reminded me of something Plum did. She kissed the bottle, and said that it would make ‘all her systems look elsewhere’. Dawn only saw me when she took off AR, and none of the normal warnings went off when I got close to the Queen.”

“I remember looking for you, and not being to see you on any of the castle frequencies, “ Marianne added, and Suni gave her a hesitant smile in thanks for her support.

“ I think who ever holds the potion is invisible to the computers. If that’s the case, we won’t be able to track it until someone starts using it."

“ _Someone_ like the imp?” Haszle’s hand went to massage her temple.

“Plum said specifically not to let the Imp get a hold of the potion.” Suni said.

“Well, I just got a report of three different dignitaries appearing around the castle, apparently pissed that they were woken for ‘just some minor crisis’, and I didn’t call for them. “

“If there’s any proof that the Imp has it…” Dadga repeated Hazel’s gesture, hand going to his brow. “Someone needs to go after it, before someone truly dangerous is woken up."

“I’ll do it.” Suni said. At the sudden looks he explained. “I can’t...I can’t help with the army or finding Dawn, or any of that. But I can do this. I know the castle better than anybody. And it won’t undo any of the horrible things I’ve done, but it might help get Dawn back. Please, let me do this.”

Dadga’s eyes softened, and he nodded, to the dismay of several of the other councilors. “Very well, boy. Get the locations from Hazel, and go after it.”

“And I’ll go after Dawn.” Marianne said, and the council erupted in protests.


	12. Rescue or War

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marianne lays out her plan for saving her sister, while Bog deals with a mess of a princess.

The rocket had slowed to a mere crawl when it came to a halt outside the goblin city and Bog’s headache had magnified twofold. There were always hiccups when using outdated technology like the bounce tubes, but only his connection to the ‘net had saved them from some rather messy collisions. He’d have to send the work crews to clear the tunnels again, hacking away roots and building dams around waterways. And they’d best do it soon, before someone less experienced than Bog tried to use a bounce-tube and ended up splattered across half the underground. 

As it was, Bog’s mind could barely think from the fatigue of calculating trajectories and rerouting them around blockages.

And the girl was _still_ screaming. 

Not as loudly, true. And she collapsed more often into whimpers and a grating, moaning whine that was almost bearable. But whenever there had been a sudden shift or a change in the light, the screams would start up again, and Bog’s headache would spike.

Hopefully his message to his mother and her doctors had gotten through, and they’d rolled out a healing vat for the girl. Now all he had to do was get her across the underground city without collapsing the whole place on their heads.

“Out you come, girlie.” He said, not bothering to hide his irritation as he slipped his clawed hands beneath her shoulders and extricated her from the car.

She screamed as her wings shifted and he bit back a groan of his own.

“It _hurts_!” She wailed, the first words out of her mouth causing Bog to pause.

Tears rolled down her pretty cheeks, and her blue eyes swam as she wrapped her tattered wings around herself, every limb in her body shaking. 

Carefully, Bog picked the quaking bundle up, enough pity working its way into his heart to attempt not to jostle the girl’s wings more than necessary. Still, she whimpered and screamed every time so much as a breeze touched one of the newly torn holes.

But, when he’d pulled her up into his arms, the girl did the absolute last thing he could have expected. She wrapped her arms around him, attempting to bury her head into his armored chest.

It was the first intimate physical contact Bog had had in a long, long while. The contact froze his mind, costing them precious seconds, forcing the girl to endure more pain. He tried to remember anything comforting to say, searching his memory of the times his own wings had ripped.

“Of course it hurts.” He said, a little too gruffly, as his own wings buzzed and they started their trip through the underground city. “Your wings were damaged by that potion.”

“P-potion?” Her fingers clenched on his carapice, her nails managing to find a gap in his armor and jabbing him painfully as she grabbed him tight. “Why would anyone make a potion that hurts?” 

Bog shrugged, navigating towards the green glow of the hospital. He might be the first goblin to return, but there were plenty of others behind him who might have gotten hurt, so the staff at the hospital had been on call for half the night, waiting for any emergencies with the few, horribly out-dated machines they had. Luckily for the girl, potion-scaring had been high on the list of dangers the staff had anticipated.

“The potion was a...medicine, once. Surely you remember taking your medicines, girl.”

He landed at the hospital entrance, the huge building towering from floor to ceiling of the cavern the goblin capital was built into. Only a third of the windows were lit, partially because the facility was always short on power, partially because it had been built for a population five times that of the goblins. Bog strode through the doors, girl pillowed in his arms, ignoring the guards who scurried out of his way.

“...I’ve never taken a medicine that hurts.” The fairy girl whimpered. Then she paused, and said slowly. “I’ve never had anything that hurts.” Her brow knitted, as if an idea was working its way through the pain, but then Bog tripped over an attendant and she started her screaming again.

The brief respite from her shrieks over, Bog had no qualms at all about dumping her directly into a vat of pain-killing liquid the moment a wincing nurse opened the lid. As the healing slime covered her head to toe, her screams finally, finally stopped, and Bog and the whole staff of the hospital sighed in relief.

\----------- 

“You can’t go after Dawn!” Half the council seemed to shout at once.

But Dadga was the only one who seemed to actually listen to her.

“Daughter, with one princess gone, we can’t have another…”

“Go missing with no explanation? You’re right. We don’t know why they took Dawn. Someone needs to go and find out. Preferably without a massive army at their heels. That will just make the situation worse.”

The war-mongering councilors blustered, but Dagda was rubbing his brow again.

“You have a point. A diplomatic solution would be better, if possible…”

“Madness! You’ll get her killed. Why don’t you leave the goblins to people who have fought them before?” Roland said to Marianne, speaking over Dadga in such a way as to earn a few shocked expressions from the younger councilors. Then he turned to the whole table. “I can get a battalion into the goblin capitol in a week, tops. We can deal with this scourge once and for all!”

“A week? A million things could happen to Dawn by then! Give me a few days, and I can scout the situation, make contact with their leaders, and solve this all without bloodshed!” Marianne said.

“It’s too late diplomacy, buttercup. It’s time for - “

“It’s never too late for diplomacy, General. We have people - AIs - designed specifically for this kind of thing!”

Marianne waved a hand, and with a pop, her three handmaidens popped into existence and there was a collective sigh of understanding from the older councilors.

Just because one AI had gone mad, did not mean that Martians had given up upon the idea. Each of the three tiny, hovering drones had a sliver of the bio-organic computer of Mars within their chassis. They could flicker in and out of the bubble dimensions with a thought, and while they were far from fully sentient they were as smart as any of the other bio-artificial “pets” Martian households often harbored.

Of course, the AIs of the Royal household had some advantages that their lesser brethren could never dream of. Though they did not have true intelligence, they had all the bubble-gifted powers that could be replicated by science: Rose could easily take on four or five of Roland’s troops, and had acted as Marianne’s trainer when no one in the army had been willing to endanger the Crown Princess. Orchid could instantly snap herself and any master into the bubble dimension, and had the intelligence to know when to do so and a subroutine that would allow her to easily transport her charge a safe distance away from any conflict...without trapping them in stone or the void of space, as was the problem with so many other bubble based transporters. 

And Lilac...well, she was perhaps the most important for this mission. With in the little bug-creature’s carapace was a connection to the ‘net stronger than any Fairy or Elf could manage. Even deep underground or far far away from a transmitter the AI could act as a constant link to the ‘net dimension. Her subroutines connected to all the knowledge of Mars, and she intelligent enough to easily be able to carry a conversation and follow complex instructions. With Lilac at her side, Marianne would have no fear of losing communication with her father or the generals. Lilac could act as a diplomat even if Marianne wanted to remain hidden, following prompts through the ‘net or simply defaulting to previously recorded diplomatic dialogues. 

The three together were a perfect combination for the mission Marianne sketched out - fast, highly mobile, and capable of protecting both themselves and anyone who accompanied them.

The problem for the council - though not for Marianne - was the fact that the three were bonded only to her. Her commands were needed to control the drones, her input necessary if there were any malfunctions. And everyone could see that the smaller the group that went with the three AIs, the faster they could move and the better chance they had of making it through the underground unhindered.

Marianne threw up an AR mask to hide her triumphant smile as councilor after councilor admitted that, yes, Marianne’s plan seemed solid.

“If you want to send out the army, that’s the choice of the generals.” She continued, trying not to let bitterness or irritation endanger her argument. She _should_ have been able to command them to hold their hand, but with Roland in charge there was little hope of that. “But we should at least try diplomacy.”

Dadga sighed. “As much as it pains me to say it, your logic is sound. A week is surely enough time to establish contact with the goblins and confirm Dawn’s safety. If nothing else, it will give us time to mobilize should the worst case scenario be true.”

Marianne nodded, and Roland sputtered.

“You can’t be serious! Sending a _girl_ out there alone?! Myself and a trained squad - “

“Would just slow me down.” Marianne argued. “And weren’t you just saying how important having an experienced general to lead the troops would be? You should do what you’re good at, and I’ll do the same.”

Roland looked down his nose at her. “Oh? And what is that, _Princess_? What _is_ a Princess good for?”

A whole Martian year later, and he still had the ability to wreck her with a look. Condescending words that had once made her feel honored to be in his glorious presence, but now stung and set her blood boiling.

But she smiled through her blood-lust, reminding herself that it was all for Dawn, and said:

“Dealing with manipulative bastards. I’ve got an amazing amount of practice.”


	13. Queen Juniper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What did happen to the Queen? And why have Marianne and Dadga remained silent about it?

Marianne packed quickly, lest the council get their heads together and decide that what she was doing was too risky, despite all her training and experience making her the perfect candidate. Her handmaidens fluttered around her, following her from room to room and whispering recommendations as she strapped on her deceptively thin battle armor and sword. Everything Lilac recommended she bring along was thrown into bubbles then loaded into side-bags that she hung low on her hips, tied with carbon nano-fiber cords that would be able to handle the stress of the upcoming flight. 

She was examining her Martian jet-pack, looking for any damage or potential tampering, when there was a quiet cough behind her.

“Princess?” 

She turned, and found Suni wringing his hands in her doorway, eyes red and hair disheveled from tugging. He still had Dawn’s train tucked into his belt.

“Suni. Come on in. Does this look safe?”

The ELF glanced at the device as it was presented to him, eyes flickering to his AR glasses. “The records say it’s been serviced within the last year. There shouldn’t be…” He interrupted himself, shaking his head. “Nevermind that. Mari, I’m _sorry_.” 

“You should be.”

He winced, and nodded.

“But I’m also not stupid, Suni. I can tell Roland put you up to it. And prevented you from telling anyone through that virus, right?”

“Yes, but…”

“But what?”

“But I did it anyways, even though I knew Roland wasn’t telling me everything. I should have known - the Queen would have been back years ago if the potion worked the way Roland said it would. But I swear, I never thought I would hurt your mother. Or Dawn.”

Marianne set the jet-pack down and let the handmaidens flutter round it, checking it with their unique skills. She leaned back onto a force-bubble, wings flapping lightly as she examined Suni’s morose expression.

“Do you know why the Queen bubbled herself?”

Suni shook his head. “Most ELFs say it was an accident. Else why...why would she leave you behind?”

Marianne laughed sadly. “Hah. If that was the case, Father would have used the potion, danger be damned. It’s certainly happened before - fairy children making bubbles too strong, ELFs getting trapped in bubbles by cruel masters, or being stuck when a bubble creator perishes, taking their commands with them. We might not have a ‘potion’ like you found, but there are ways to unlock almost any normal bubble with minimal danger to the inhabitants, and Hazel has a whole division dedicated to only that.”

She shook her head. “Mother’s bubble is different. She placed a geas on it. Without a dissolving potion, it will only pop when certain conditions are met.”

\-------  
 _  
The memory came easy to her mind, along with the sharp pain that always accompanied it._

_Queen Juniper, beautiful as always, even in her rage, storming away from the council chambers after another bitter defeat. Marianne couldn’t remember what the argument had been about, just another one of an endless stream of shouting matches that had grown between the King and Queen as one argued for tradition and simplicity, and the other argued for freedom and safety for all her citizens. No one had supported the Queen’s radical ideas then, and things hadn’t changed much since she had bubbled herself a half century ago._

_But in Marianne’s memories, all that had mattered in that moment was the expression on her mother’s face, as the anger and hurt faded and she slumped against the wall, hand going to hide her eyes and she_ sobbed. __

_Years later, Marianne wondered if things would have been different if she had gone to Juniper then, comforted her mother and promised to help, rather than staying hidden behind a column, shocked beyond moving at the sight of her perfect mother showing an emotion beyond kindness or perfectly poised righteous rage._

_Later that night, after Marianne’s handmaidens and ELF attendants had put her to bed, she had woken to find her mother sitting just past the warm glow of the protective field, watching her daughter sleep._

__“Mummy?” _In the darkness it was hard to read Juniper’s expression, but there was wetness at the corners of her eyes and when she leaned forward to kiss her daughter’s brow there was a sad smile on her face._ “What’s wrong, Mummy?”

“Too much, my sweets.” _She drew Marianne into a hug, and little girl buried her face into her mother’s blouse. The scent of crushed roses still took Mari back to that moment._ “Far too much.”

“Can we make it better?” _The little Marianne asked, concern in her young voice.  
_  
“I’m afraid not. At least...I cannot. Maybe you’ll have some luck where I haven't.”

“But...you can do anything.”  
 _  
Juniper laughed and pulled her daughter closer._ “Oh, I wish that was true, my love. But I’m afraid there is only one thing left for me.” 

“What’s that?”

“Mummy’s going to go away for a while. Maybe a long, long while.”

“Can I come with you?”

“No, my dear. You need to stay here and help your father.”  
 _  
This made sense to the young Marianne, and she solemnly nodded._ “I’ll take care of Daddy and Dawn and Suni, too. And all of Mars! Just like you do!”  
 _  
A strangled sob broke from Juniper’s mouth and she wrapped both her arms and wings around her daughter and hugged her tight enough that for a moment neither could breath._

_Then she pulled herself away, and held Mari at arm’s length.  
_  
“When I’m gone, some people are going to come and ask you a lot of questions.”   
_  
Marianne, still getting her breath back, simply nodded._

__“You can tell them that I’ll come back when the bubbles open and all of mars is one.” _Her voice rang, lights flickering as she spoke with an inflection that commanded the computers to listen as well.  
_  
“When...the bubbles open?”  
 _  
Juniper nodded._ “...and all of mars is one. Remember that, my sweet child.”   
__  
She kissed her daughter’s brow again, and Marianne felt sleep take her away.

_Juniper bubbled herself later that night. No one noticed she was gone until far, far too late. It had been said that the Queen of Mars was the strongest Fairy ever to be born, and her command of both fields and computers proved it. She had shrouded herself in a million different bubble-layers, solidifying over the week it took to uncover the bubble, making it near impossible to cut through. No one had thought to ask Marianne where her mother had gone, so precious time was lost, and the geas worked its way deep into the code of the Martian computer network, protecting the bubble from any but the worst brute-force methods of popping it, a technique that had been lost to the goblin-depths with the banishment of the mad AI Sugar Plum._

_Queen Juniper was gone, until her geas had been fulfilled.  
_  
\------------------------- 

“So...you’ve never tried to unbubble her out of respect for her decision?”

Marianne blinked, memory fading and Suni’s warm face coming into view. Amazing how he always seemed to understand what she was trying to explain, even when she herself wasn’t totally certain what she was trying to say. 

“That was my Father’s decision. Mother took herself away for a reason. To act as inspiration when nothing else could be done.” She sighed. “I suppose it’s no surprise that no-one outside the royal family knows of it. My father’s honor did not extend that far, and I’m sure his councilors convinced him that letting the true reason be known might start a revolution.”

“Does Dawn know?” Suni asked.

“Some of it, I assume. But you were both so young when it happened. And even I don’t like to think about it much.” 

“I guess it wouldn’t have mattered either way. If I brought the Queen back by breaking her heart and burning her wings, I doubt even Dawn would ever want to see me again. Roland’s right - I _am_ a monster.”

_**Bonk**_. Suni winced as Marianne’s fist connected with the top of his head in a light punch.

“You’re no monster. Stupid, yes. Way too eager to listen to Dawn’s orders, too. I’ve been telling you that for fifty years.” Suni flushed, and Marianne continued. “But people do stupid things when they’re in love. And try as I might, there’s no way I can get rid of that. So why don’t you start thinking a bit - about yourself, about your situation, heck, about what Dawn really needs - before just jumping right to the first thing you think will make her happy?”

“But that’s all I want…”

“For Dawn to be happy? Much as I adore my sister, living an eternally blissful life isn’t something I’d wish on anyone.” She paused. “When I get back with Dawn, and I _will_ bring her back, you two better sit down and have a long talk about this.” She reached out and shook her friend lightly. “Your stupid crush wasn’t the problem - not talking about it and letting people manipulate you with it was. Fix that, and I won’t have to pummel you when I get back.”

Suni swallowed, and nodded.

“Good. Now help me strap this on.”

Suni hurried to pick up the jet-pack and waited for Marianne to levitate him to the appropriate height. 

\--------------------------

The device didn’t look much like any jet-pack a pre-fall ELF would have imagined. No turbines, no sleek fuel lines or thick heat-shielding. And no protection at all for the wearer. Just small white box, tapered at the front, opening in back, attached to a beige vest. 

But the device didn’t need any typical protections. It produced no exhaust; an explosion did not propel it and its wearer forward. No, the bubble inside simply produced _thrust_ , a push in the right direction. Everything else was taken care of by Marianne. 

She cinched in her wings as Suni maneuvered the straps around them. He was careful not to touch any edges despite the difficulty. He might have seen Mari naked a half dozen times, but touching another’s wings was far, far more intimate that simply seeing a bit of skin. Only a doctor or lover would ever be so brazen to touch the physical manifestation of a fairy’s _mind_. 

But Mari didn’t notice the difficulty Suni had, familiar with the routine of being dressed by attendants since she was small. Suni did the same for Dawn occasionally, when her maid was busy with a more finicky piece of clothing, but he avoided it lest he get distracted by the vibrant, swirling colors of Dawn’s wings. Luckily, he had no such temptation for Marianne, and the vest went on without upset.

The Crown Princess cinched the straps tight around her chest then rolled her shoulders, settling the pack comfortably into the small of her back, just below where her wings grew. Her handmaidens flew to her side, chittering, and she opened one of her packs to let them in. Each contracted into a tight ball and nestled themselves among the storage bubbles for transport.

Suni stood back as Marianne flexed her wings and commanded a window screen to open. She looked back at Suni.

“Do I look okay?” There was a slight waiver of uncertainty to her voice, and Suni felt a surge of pride - and sorely needed self confidence - that Mari still trusted him enough to drop the mask of perfect control around him.

He nodded, and she flashed him a smile. 

“Good. I’ll call as soon as I know where Dawn is.” Then, impulsively, she swept him up in a hug, and for a moment they both clung tightly to each other, the fear and chaos of the past four hours rising up and threatening to crack Mari’s resolute facade, the terrible worries that came to Suni’s mind allowed to the surface, the roll of both their emotions let out, for just long enough for the other to acknowledge and offer support. 

“I _will_ bring her back.” Marianne promised.

“And I’ll do everything I can get the potion.” Suni said. And they both tightened their hold on their friend, before finally letting go.

Her wings flashed in the light of the sun, brilliant purple momentarily lighting up her rooms, before she was gone, darting through the spires and traffic around the castle, speeding towards open air and the dangers ahead.

\--------------------------

“Sire?”

Bog looked up from a screen displaying reports from the goblin raid. Lists of injuries and suggested rewards danced in his mind, the minutiae of command falling upon him like so many bricks, slamming down as the adrenaline gave way to bone-weary routine.

“Yes, Cleave?”

The stocky goblin coughed. She was of one of the more common species, short and round, vaguely amphibian. Much like the recently retrieved Stuff, who Bog had high hopes for. The species seemed to keep their wits after the transformation, and it was enough of a rarity that Bog assigned most to jobs which required focus and common sense, something that most other goblins were sorely lacking. _Usually_ they could deal with problems without needing his help.

She coughed. “It’s about the fairy, sire.”

She winced and scuttled backwards hurriedly as the King’s eyes snapped to her and his shoulder-plates raised in irritation.

“What about the fairy?”

“Well...she seems to have taken to the treatment! That’s good!” Cleave tried a smile, but it didn’t reach far before Bog’s glare froze it halfway to her cheeks. 

“You wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t a problem.”

“Right. Um. Well. The treatment - the painkillers, mostly - they might be working _too_ well.”

Bog covered his eyes with one huge hand and massaged his brow. “Is she still screaming?”

“No. But…”

“But?”

“She’s _singing._ And we can’t get her to stop.”


	14. Boggy Woggy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> That fateful meeting of Bog and Dawn. Plus, Marianne does some sight-seeing.

Marianne flexed her wings, an action that felt somewhere between a toe-touch and solving a puzzling math problem. A stretch in the brain, but with all the pleasure that came from the physical act. 

She didn’t get to let loose and fly often, her responsibilities often literally grounding her. So despite the dire circumstances, she couldn’t help but enjoy the momentary freedom. 

Marianne’s rooms were high in the castle, far above the audience chambers and public spaces, higher even than Dawn and her Father’s suits. It had nothing to do with status, and little to do with her responsibilities as Roland had effectively convinced the world that she was in charge of defense in name only. Another Crown Prince or Princess would have lived even higher, closer to the shield generators and observation platforms, always a moments flight away from the elevator connecting the palace to on of Mars’s many space stations. Now a minor military attache did the work of monitoring such things, and likely did a better job of it that the busy Marianne could, but it still rankled.

Still, the view from her rooms was stunning, and the air around her window was clear of the normal flight traffic. Far below other fairies flew, or ELFs on dozens of different kinds of insectoid transports. Half mechanical, half organic dragonflies buzzed around the public areas of the palace, their maneuverability and speed making them perfect for taxis, while millipedes a thousand times the size of their earth counterparts with hollow interiors acted like trains for hauling large quantities of goods.

Marianne took note of the healthy bustle of the castle, then tightened one set of wings around herself, easing into true invisibility. Dawn and Suni might prefer to hide themselves from prying eyes by simply throwing up an AR shield, but Marianne prefered the more complete safety of hiding from light itself. 

Admittedly, not many fairies had such control over their fields as to warp light completely around their body. And fewer still could use other abilities at the same time. Being of royal lineage had its perks. Marianne hovered easily as she looked over the palace, invisible from all but the most clever fielder or tech-wizard. 

Within her AR, her handmaidens buzzed around her; Rose looking for dangers, Orchid testing her connection to the ‘net, and Lilac offering up the most important piece of information - a suggested map to their destination. 

The flight would be long, taking a wide curve from the upper plains to the hypothesized location of the goblin city far to the south. The curve was necessary, taking them almost an hour off course but was necessary to avoid the crystal that sat squarely between the old pre-terraformed martian settlements and the current Fairy lands. 

Lilac’s plan was good, and Marianne wheeled and set off to follow it, moving outside of the more populous areas before engaging her jetpack. 

It took only a few minutes to fly beyond the main palace grounds, her route taking her over the military barracks just to the south. It was a hive of activity, the skurry of ELFs and Fairies alike looking like ants from the distance Marianne saw them. Roland had gotten his way: the army was preparing to march on the Goblin capitol. He wouldn’t even wait for her to report back, and likely had convinced the generals that she was a lost cause, in need of rescuing as well. Lies and violence, the only two things he did well.

The thought made Marianne glare, and her control wavered for a moment, confirming that the army had no one watching the air. Plenty of goblins had wings, presumably some of them could become close to invisible and do aerial reconnaissance. Roland should have had someone watching the skies for the tell-tale shimmer of warped light. But no one looked up, much less hailed her to request identification. 

Marianne shook her head and continued on her way. The army was...sloppy. That was the nicest word for it. Dull would be another. They practiced techniques that were 2000 years out of date, missing the way fields and AR could change the nature of war. If Goblins could slip into the palace and kidnap a Princess, what else could they do? And if she could see everything the Army did from above, how secure were those vaulted military tactics Roland was always bragging about? 

It was a grim thought to wonder about how the army would do should they encounter an actual war, against motivated opponents. Marianne was certain the goblins would defend themselves should the need arise, and she wasn’t confident her forces could win under Roland’s leadership. There would be terrible bloodshed on both sides if her mission didn’t succeed. 

With that thought turning over in her mind, she flapped her wings and pushed herself beyond the army grounds, and on out into Mars proper, worry speeding her wings as well as her thoughts.

\------------------------------------- 

It was another hour before Bog had a chance to to visit the Fairy girl again. He had been away from the goblin city for a week, inspecting their defenses, retrieving more goblins from the Bubble repository, and then dealing with the fallout of Plum’s potion. Though most everything in the goblin city ran on automatic there were still  _ people  _ involved, and thus ruffled feathers to sooth (or in Bog’s case shout down) and tensions to ease. 

The problem was that there was always just enough, and rarely any extra. Just enough food. Just enough medicine. And of course everyone wanted their families back, but every addition to the city’s population had to included in their budgeting. And there were always unexpected accidents and losses. Bog was already worried about the addition of another troll-like goblin to their ranks, the huge creature needing to eat his own weight in protein every day. All goblins did better on meats, but the hydroponics systems of Old Mars simply were not equipped to handle the nutritional needs of carnivores. For every Brutus brought back, three other goblin families had to wait another year for their loved one’s return. But it wasn’t as if Bog could send a goblin back into their bubble simply because they were too big. For all his fierce demeanor, he wasn’t that cruel. So Anthony joined their ranks, just like Stuff and Fizz and Chen Lu. 

So the first thing he did upon returning home after a week of rambling was to read all the reports; tons of food produced by the hydroponics bays, hectors of cavern discovered or reclaimed, liters of water stolen from the fairies, oxygen levels throughout the underground, and on and on, every different number a weight on a scale that could tip the whole underground into chaos, or free them to finally accept more into their number.

Bog claimed to avoid the goblin city for this very reason, though the true reason was waiting for him when he returned to the hospital.

“Bog!” An ancient orderly rushed up, bright white uniform harkening back to a style that hadn’t been seen in over a thousand years. The face that she could wear a skirt that short without any hint of shame belied everything Bog knew about Earth medical practices.

“Mother. I thought you were overseeing the clinics in the East.”

She beamed, and wrapped her stumpy arms his waist, as high as she could reach. She was one of the smaller goblin sub-types, coming out of her bubble with a short, humanoid stature and thick horns covering most of her head. She had never developed wings - very few humans ever did - but her whip quick mind had not dulled the slightest over her transformation and the intervening centuries. Once a simple nurse orderly, one of thousands in a huge New York hospital, now she lead all the medical facilities that served the underground.

Given how often goblins got injured, either from their own stupidity or the danger in their everyday lives, she was just as busy as Bog was.

Or should have been. But there she was, chattering a mile a minute, praising him for bringing home such a fascinating specimen.

Or, as she called it, “a perfect catch.” Bog felt his headache returning even before he saw the girl again.

\------------------ 

Mars shimmered from above. A teal blue sea stretched out below Marianne, an endless expanse of green, wind rolling through and sending sparkles towards the stars. 

But there was no ocean on Mars. It had been blown away a billion years before humanity even existed, the weak magnetic field of Earth’s sister-planet evaporating as its core cooled and slowed, leaving it victim to the solar winds that carried away air and water alike, blowing everything needed for organic life out into the void.

Most every drop of water on Mars was pulled back from that very same void: frozen ice towed from the asteroid belt by small space craft then loaded onto space elevators and sent down to the planet. It was a costly process, dangerous as well for the Martins who navigated the belt searching for ever more water to send home. They imported Atmosphere, too, though that mostly came from Venus, the greenhouse gases needed to cocoon the planet and form a protective cover eternally added to the thin Martian atmosphere, undoing the stripping of the planet caused by eons of solar wind before humans re-started the core to aid in their terraform efforts.

So Water was precious on Mars, not enough to be rationed, but certainly in far too short a supply to waste on something like an  _ ocean _ . 

Instead the sea stretching below Marianne was a forest, half artificial trees growing kilometers high, dwarfing everything around them, each glass leaf painted with photosynthesizing algae that both cleaned the Martian air and provided power to the whole planet. Each leaf was no bigger than her hand, and they were only tinted blue: it was possible to see through hundreds of stories of foliage almost like a real ocean. And beneath the boughs of those trees whole cities flourished in eternal twilight, ELFs living out their entire lives serving trees that held up the very sky itself.

But Marianne did not dip beneath the wide branches or try to catch a glimpse of the hurrying inhabitants. Instead she flew above even the tallest trees, so high that she brought her own oxygen with her, hardening her fields to near impenetrability and rebreathing the air she had gathered back in the palace as she skimmed above the endless sea of foliage. Few ELFs could survive at this height, the atmosphere too thin. Some Fairies brought pleasure craft up here, to surf the wind currents and enjoy the spectacle, but just like Mariane they brought their own oxygen, usually in the form of tubers harvested from the insides of the giant trees, a single cell swelling to hold a whole day’s worth of oxygen.

Marianne moved far faster than any of  _ those _ vehicles could manage, shaping her fields into a point in front of her and letting her thruster push her ever faster forward. In a thicker atmosphere she might have left a sonic boom behind her, but in the thin air of Mars she moved with just a whisper. It took concentration to maintain her fields, remaining invisible while also commanding physical field to hold her air, and managing the shield that eased them through the thin air and allowed the jet-pack to do its work. All the while making sure to steer around obstacles and follow Lilac’s map. 

She would traverse half of Mars in a few short hours, all on her own power. 

_ Beat  _ that _ , Roland _ , she thought to herself with some satisfaction.  _ Who’s a useless princess now?  _

\------------------------------- 

Just as warned, the girl was singing, but not in any language Bog knew. Her high, wavering voice filled the Wing Ward, the other inhabitants groaning every time she hit a high note. And she could sing  _ very _ high, her vocal range shifting into the hypersonic, making Bog quite glad that they had no dog-like goblins currently growing wings, else they might have had a riot.

His mother, Griselda, was chattering animatedly as they approached the girl; so far she had spent the most time with the fairy, her general tone-deafness for once finding a use. Her information was not the least bit useful to Bog, mostly extolling the various virtues of the girl in an unsubtle attempt to convince him to see the girl as a potential mate rather than a captive.

He let her prattle on until they reached the door to the girl’s room, then turned on her.

“Mother. I’d like to remind you of what I said  _ last  _ time you tried to set me up with someone. What was my one rule?”

Griselda paused mid-sentence, her mouth snapping into a disappointed pout.

“...you won’t date anyone who screamed at the sight of you.” And if she had remained silent, they likely would have avoided a later row. “But really. Don’t you think that rule is a bit too extreme? You can’t expect most girls to…”

Bog paused before the door, claws cutting into the door frame.  _ Too extreme _ . For anyone else, it would never even be considered. But he was hideous, a monster made flesh, and to look upon him unprepared always had the same result - tears and screams. Even women warned of his appearance flinched away. Even goblins sometimes shuddered when they saw him. And how many times had he opened a bubble, helped someone into the light, only for them to get one look at him and flee in terror?

No. He had set the bar too low, if anything. 

“And anyways, how do you  _ know _ she was screaming at the sight of you? It could have been the pain, or the shock, or any number of …”

He pinched his nose and reminded her. “Two  _ hours _ mother. She screamed in my ear for  _ two hours _ . I am  _ not _ making her my wife.”

Griselda’s eyes gleamed. “Don’t get so cocky, boy. You haven’t met her yet.”

“I don’t see how that will…”

“BOGGY!” 

The singing snapped out the instant Bog opened the door, and he was greeted with a smile so bright it nearly lit the underground. 

The fairy girl was sitting on a medical bed, hands outstretched as if she had been conducting a symphony in time with her song. Perhaps, in her mind, she had been. She wasn’t restrained, though her legs were tucked into a hospital blanket. Griselda or one of the other nurses must have taken pity on her, as glowing mushrooms and other lights brightened the normally darkened room enough almost to rival the surface sun. Across the room was another open door, and goblins skittered around it - children, mostly, come to visit their parents in other wards and taking the time to sneak in to get a look at a real live fairy. Most had never seen one before.

The girl didn’t notice any of this, and it was easy to see why. It was the same reason she did not need to be restrained. 

Behind her, completely engulfing her wings and mooring her to the floor, was a giant bubble of greenish liquid. Bog knew from personal experience that it was filled with diluted painkillers in equal parts to the psychiatric drugs needed to repair Potion Burn. That the girl was awake at all was a surprise - most goblins or ELFs burned by Plum’s potion spent most of their recovery time sleeping. They needed to regrow parts of their minds, after all. 

But the goblin doctors had never been faced with a full-blooded fairy before. Clearly they had erred on the side of caution, and given her enough drugs to dull the mind of a goblin twice her size. But instead of knocking her out cold, she was high as a kite and  _ singing _ .

At least, she had been singing, until she saw Bog. Of  _ course _ Griselda had told the girl of him. Probably his mother hadn’t stopped chattering the entire time she cared for her. There was no telling what the fluttery creature now thought.

He sighed as he summoned a chair and sat down next to her. “Bog. My name is Bog.”

She smile again, eyes twinkling. “I know! Boggy Woggy Kingy Wingy! My  _ hero _ !”

“Your  _ captor _ . Do not take my assistance as anything but momentary pity. Now that you are here, you will have to answer for your people’s actions.”

She blinked at him, clearly not understanding a single word. He tried again.

“My name is - “

“Boggy!”

“Bog. And you are?”

She drew herself up, then winced as her instinctive attempt to flare her wings sent shooting pain to her mind. But she rallied a moment later, words falling from her mouth so easily that she must have said them a million times.

“I am Princess Dawn of Mars, First in Kindness, Leader of Light and Laughter, Duchess of the High Courts, Mistress of the Castle and Caretaker of all Mankind, Second Princess to the Throne of Mars and eternal ally to all in need across the Galaxy.” She bowed deeply in her seat, then rose again, the stiff formality of her titles evaporating as soon as it appeared, beaming smile returning to her face. “But  _ You  _ can call me Dawn. All my friends do!”

Bog carefully closed his mouth. Already his mind was whirling with the girl’s revelation, desperately hoping it wasn’t true. But there was no doubt that  _ she _ , at least, believed her words. And if there was even a  _ chance _ …

A quick query to the underground’s darknet was all he needed. The girl looked exactly like the Princess. The titles matched and they’d taken her from the very stage of Mars’ monarchy, the Queen’s Chamber. What she said was almost certainly true.

Bog had kidnapped a Princess.

Dawn saw the growing horror on his face and surged forward, grasping his huge hands in hers.

“Don’t be sad, Boggy! I’m  _ so _ glad you saved me! I’ve met ever so many nice people here. There’s Griselda and Patricia and Edwin and Brutus who says I’m  _ very  _ pretty but he won’t eat me and I’ve got so many  _ plans _ for this place and I can’t  _ wait  _ to tell Mari and…”

He jerked away and snapped his head towards his mother.

“She can’t contact the outside world, can she?”

Griselda shook her head. “The Dark Net is secure. But I don’t think she’s realized it yet.” The goblin city had full access to the public AR net...but nothing from inside the city could leave. They were a dark hole on the AR map, and dozens of goblins worked hard to make sure that continued. Should their blackout ever break, the fairies would be on the city as fast as their army could fly. 

Though, that might very well happen anyways given that they had captured their beloved Princess.

“And I’ve been thinking about a winter wedding, I’ve never planned one of those before, and aren’t these colors just  _ perfect _ ?” The girl was waving her hands, clearly doing something in AR, but Bog didn’t have time to pay attention to her. Suddenly there were far more important things to care about. But first...

“Mother, did you  _ know _ who she was?”

“Well, she  _ did _ say she was a Princess…”

“Mother! We’re all in danger! And you were thinking about getting me a  _ date _ ?”

Bog turned on his own AR, putting the underground on high alert with a single command, his mind whirling. With any luck, they didn’t know where the Princess had gone. Maybe if she healed fast enough, they could return her without any bloodshed...but no,  _ Roland _ was in charge. He’d never let them get away with that...so they were in for a fight. But the underground had prepared for an invasion for years. With the right strategy...

Plans spun in Bog’s head, but he took the time to pat the girl’s hand. 

“Don’t worry, Princess. We’ll get you home safe and sound.”

Any ally in this was a good one, he thought. But her next words chilled him to the core.

“But I don’t want to  _ leave _ ! We’re going to get  _ married _ ! That will solve  _ everything _ !”


End file.
